Prefatory note: I heartily enjoy and endorse n+1, generally. But —

Kent Russell’s “American Juggalo”, in the latest n+1, is probably the worst essay I’ve read all year. Strike. Easily the worst essay. I, in fact, did not want to buy the latest edition because I saw it was in there, but for supercurricular reasons found I needed to read his travel missive.

Some critical perspective: why was this reporter selected — by himself, as it were? Answer:

I’ve never seen Citizen Kane and I don’t care to, but Kane Hodder is the best and only Jason Voorhees in my mind. I have no idea what Casablanca is about, but I can give you rundowns of Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Fero, Sexo Cannibal, and Antropophagus […] “Serious” film strikes me as absurd. It’s bowdlerized life. Filmic drama asks me to care about loves, losses, and supposed triumphs, which together amount to the chiseled dash connecting my birth to my death on my tombstone. To me, the modern horror film has more to do with first-world existence as it is lived today. Im the modern horror film, we no longer come together to defeat a beast, gaining knowledge of and confidence in ourselves along the way. Altruism is no longer rewarded. Even the most self-sacrificing character will be killed off, often for laughs.

Mr Russell is a horror film-o-phile, so he’s covering the Gathering. That actually makes sense. But, he thinks that Citizen Kane is a big happy romp of a film in which a band of unwitting optimists come together to and defeat some sort of beast, all the while growing as people. He thinks Citizen Kane was altruistic! That’s not… good. He is, then, basically an ignorant fellow who’s unabashed — proud of his ignorance. Good. Glad that’s where we’re starting from.

Generally, the essay isn’t much different than ones in The Village Voice or Deadspin: the Gathering is hard to get to.There are lots of drugs. There are lots of creepy dudes. There are lots of terrifying moments with drugs and creepy dudes. The music is terrible. No, I’m not talking about a New York City Blogger Party! (Stay on topic.) I’m talking about Middle Americans, here.

These Middle Americans! Let me let Mr Russell tell you about them. But first, a brief excursion into race. Because for me the most interesting parts of Mr Russell’s essay are about race. I mean, he goes into race a lot! For a piece on a festival that’s ostensibly five-nines white, there’s a certain coloration to the reportage. At first I was like [makes a kind of quizzical half-smile face], but then I was like [full-on Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, slapping face on either side with both hands and making that screaming noise]!

He says,

I also wrote [in a Faygo’d upon notepad] that juggalos seem far more comfortable around black people than your average middle American, and I still think that. There were a handful of blacks at the Gathering who weren’t performers, and their interactions with the juggalos (though I might have expected tension, going in) were some of the most natural white-black interactions I’ve ever observed. It was just dudes talking to one another.

IMAGINE THAT: WHITE PEOPLE TREATING BLACK PEOPLE LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE.

Mind = Blown.

Holy + Fuck.

“Some of the most natural white-black interactions”, unlike all the ones I witness in… my ‘coastal elite’ city? OK, whatever. I’ll grant that the comfort of your observed “white-black interactions” may vary, but this seems like an odd thing to note sort of out of the blue, or even as a roundabout way or characterizing a rap group you saw playing.

Also, let me say, I didn’t not notice the cultural derision dripping from the phrase “your average middle American”.

Mr Russell elsewhere notes that all the acts on ICP’s record label are “white or Native American”. This point is salient because… we all know that whites and Native Americans have had a great, mutually-beneficial natural history together. (I kid.) I know that it’s supposed to be a sanguine way to say “not black”. “A++ for that weirdly a-historical circumlocution”, says your circumlocution professor.

The larger point he made with this phrase was to indicate that “horrorcore” is a largely white (and Native American, I guess) thing.

This all above is to say that the juggalos, while definitely, empirically-verifiably white, are actually a lot like people color. They’re basically people of color without actually being people of color. The juggalos treat people of color the same as each other. Like people of color, the juggalos make (separate but equal) rap music. (No Plessy v. Ferguson-mo.) The juggalos are also quite poor, like people of color. To wit,

The good liberal definition of the underclass is something like: black and brown, struggling but persisting, dignified, systematically disadvantaged, living for the dream of becoming We. Americans don’t have a hard time explaining white poverty because Americans rarely try, even though most poor people in this country are white. If you’re white in this country, it’s taken for granted that you’re part of We.

Not all juggalos are poor. Many bristle at the accusation. But a lot, maybe most, are. In the last decade, the Midwest experienced the largest upswing in poverty in the US. a third of the country’s poor now live in suburban Middle America. Still, you’ll never heard a juggalo use the term “white trash.” […] You can be a juggalo, or you can be white trash — the first term is yours, the second is somebody else’s.

OK, I get what you’re saying, in a way. Poor people, regardless of color, are often ignored by society. And it seems like, to get some press or at least a handout or a loose cigarette, you have to be black or brown. I have, however, a few disjointed (yet arbitrarily enumerated) notes:

1. “The good liberal definition of the underclass is something like: black and brown”. #The good liberal definition of the underclass is something like: black and brown.
2. This, from an essay in which Mr Russell entirely predictably and stupidly, might I add, talks about how his parents actually became, in a suddenly overnight fashion, quite rich, but his privileged upbringing was entirely mitigated because he was a ‘minority’ (my scare quotes, because he’s not that stupid shout out to Gawker!, because you are!), a ‘minority’ in his Miami high school, which had a studentry composed 80% hispanic, 10% black, 10% other.
3. ‘The concept of “Whiteness = Other” is fucking terrifying in ways Anthropophagus IV just fails to acquire’, says Mr Russell’s subtext. Are you scared? I’m scared. Let’s move on.
4. Do you have capital-W “We” meetings? Are they capital-K-K-K “We” meetings, as well? I mean, gosh, I know when you have a publication of which Malcolm Gladwell has said, “n+1 is rigorous, curious and provocative. Intelligent thought is not dead in New York. It has simply moved to Brooklyn”, that you’re angling for a certain demographic, but really? I’m not a part of your “We”, even though I dole out my thrice-yearly $13.95 to I guess culturally signify that I kinda sorta am (when you let me be!).
5. I actually think that “white trash” was your term, every time, Mr Russell. Noting the fact that juggalos — by not using slurs like “white trash” — haven’t enlisted in the particularly odious class warfare battalion you seem to lead is an insightful ingress to your own sort of pathological un-self-awareness.
6. The, I think, overall sociological algebra of the situation is, then, that this massive group of white people is rendered oppressed, practically like black people, even (!!!!), because they’re so goddamn poor.

Another passage of Mr Russell’s paints a quite stirring character portrait:

The mother was in a bikini top and her son was shirtless, yangs of black paint smeared on his face. They were probably a combined 30 years old, yet stretch marks mottled their bodies. Fat dangled off them in dermal saddle bags as empty as the calories that made them. Again, I bring this up not because I’m body-snarking but because I’ve only ever seen these physiques in places — the Bronx; Liberty City, Florida; New Castle — where dinner comes either from a Burger King or the convenience store.

Fat. Fucking. White. Trash. Middle. Americans. Am. I. Right?

“I’m not body-snarking”, I’m just “using my steely, journalistic eye to describe a social-anthropological creature I’ve only seen in places I usually fly from, in sheer terror, because they remind me of the primordial ooze that is the poor white America that I (and my family, as I’ve previously noted) have made it our life-fucking-long goal never to see again unless it’s in the guise of reporting on a hyper-real, LARP-esque carnival of horror the likes of which I’ve only seen imagined by such auteurs as [the people who made Sexo Cannibal and Cannibal Holocaust].”

This detached, pseudo-anthropological manner of writing is the most, to me, unacceptable aspect of this essay. It displays the defect of the soul that John Gardner would call “frigidity”. To put it in more contemporary terms, a passage from Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things’s essay on the New York Times [that was a mouthful, sorry]:

And as the Timesian dalliance with the money culture billows upward, so does its vision of the plight of working Americans grow evermore puzzled, voyeuristic, and patrician. It’s true that the paper is one of the only remaining metropolitan dailies to still employ a labor correspondent, the truly accomplished and sharp-eyed Steven Greenhouse. But it’s also quite distressingly plain that the general treatment of working Americans in Timesland is akin to the way that the Weekly World News handles the Bigfoot beat — a source of erratic goggle-eyed wonderment, but not in any way a constituency claiming a serious purchase on adult attention.

“Goggle-eyed wonderment” is literally the best way to describe popular descriptions of the Gathering. Mr Russell’s semi-conscious thoughts on race, though, transport this essay from the realm of ‘merely un-self-aware’ to the land of ‘kind of pernicious’. It’s one thing, entirely, to say that the juggalos are like, I guess, Tea Party members: disaffected, un-voiced, mostly white folk who massing to spend their cultural capital on big, blow-out extravaganzas of outlandishness and rhetorical violence. That’s sort of interesting, or at least it was the first two or three times someone wrote that. It’s entirely another thing to be openly disdainful of thousands and thousands of people, to then say in somewhat coded (but not, like, encrypted, I guess, since it’s easy to figure out what you mean) language that these people are basically so low on the totem pole (which I say because whites and Native Americans…) that they’re basically black (of all things, how terrible!), and dammit if I’m not glad I’m not one of them because, boy oh boy, they are sure messed up and totally fucked. It’s disrespectful not to juggalos, to white people, to black people, to ICP, to Brooklynites, or to me: it’s disrespectful to the human condition.

I will say that the disdain Russell shows for everyone he interacts with — except for himself and the anonymous five or six people who exhorted him on Gchat to report on the Gathering when they presumably read about it last year — his disdain is actually terrifying to me. It presages a world in which no one countenances or cares about any others but their immediate social-economic peers, and those they covet or wish to fuck. If this is what passes for written reportage and intellection, by people who presumably presume to know better, then I am not very optimistic for cranking the machine of social change by means of the written word.

The fucked up thing is that it did not have to be this way.

The essay sort of winds down with Mr Russell running into a guy who had, in the beginning, pitched his tent for him. (Explanation: this writer tool lacked the experience or skill to put up a one-man tent. His underclass brethren, used to ‘roughing it’ or maybe ‘being homeless’ [are those the same thing? I don’t know…] actually just fucking put his tent up for him because they must, what?, instinctively have the urge to serve or whatever maybe some people are nice.) Russell runs into this guy, on whom he had noted previously he’d wanted to latch, presumably to use him as some form of guide cum footman. The guy’s name is Adam. Adam’s like, ‘You’re making everyone uncomfortable because you keep saying how you’re going to write something about the Gathering, and we have no power over what you’re going to write, and you’re probably going to make us look like assholes’. (That guy is perceptive! n+1 should get that guy to write an essay, for serious.) And Mr Russell is like, ‘Oh no no no no noooooo. Tell me your story. I want to do right by you guys!’ And Adam says:

“Motherfucker, not everyone wants to be you, you know what I’m saying?”

If this essay were a film, this would be the moment in the film where everyone in the audience whooped and hollered. But it’s not a film, it’s an essay that I read all alone, so all I could do was highlight this line. This clearly seems — to my decidedly non-journalistic, from a skills-perspective and also experience-perspective, mind’s eye — this moment clearly seems like the moral center or at least most interesting interaction Russell had during the entire Gathering. It could have been the lens or the denouement or some other type of important device in the essay. Instead, Russell breezes by it, pausing only to insert a disjointed shift in the conversation so as to make Adam look kind of like a mental fool. End scene.

The end of the essay has one more tiny slam on Middle America. (Via Taylor Swift). It’s whatever. I don’t like Taylor Swift, and I thought it was a bit much. Who cares, though. I’m tired of writing this essay. I suppose my overall point, which I will now tell you straight up because perhaps I have been unable to convey it succinctly, is that Motherfucker, not everyone wants to be you, you know what I’m saying, Kent Russell? It’s also partially, Motherfucker, fuck you. I’d mark it about six of one, half a dozen the other — if and only if the academy won’t expel me for using a common persons’s colloquialism, that is.

I’m not saying I won’t not fail to renew my subscription to n+1 or anything. I probably won’t stop buying their tote bags and inspirational prints. But they had definitely better watch it with the printing racist propaganda shenanigans. I’m pretty angry about it. I’m not saying that I’ll convene a panel discussion on “What was the poor person?” or that I’ll start a post-ironic on-line petition about how much I fear people of color in order to prove some soft of next-level point about racism and un-self-conscious writers sojourning into Middle America and sashaying out with venomous and contemptuous essays about poor folk. Because all this artifice isn’t helping us or making us better. You know, the capital-U “Us” of whoever will stand with or abide by the loose social, moral, and cultural norms that seem to cohere small societies? The “Us” to which I’d invite Mr Russell and the juggalos and people of color and even people who live in the Bronx. The Us isn’t helped by essays, generally speaking. So I’m also kind of a self-indulgent asshole here, writing about 2,000 words on some other few thousand words published in a (let’s be honest) pretty obscure New York City journal.

I suppose, maybe, it’s the exhaustion of words by reality that leads to really shoddy essays like “American Juggalo”, and why every year, talented people out there think to themselves, ‘I can do better than the ones last year’. But maybe let’s next year donate the gas money to a food shelter or something and not write about it and try to have more “natural black-white interactions” in the future and be less judgmental and prickish about things. Even shitty essays in n+1.