I was all set to induct Denis Johnson into my pantheon of adventurous, artistic weirdos, when suddenly, wham, there's "The Militia in Me," 1995.
Denis Johnson was a fucking boomer centrist, which is to say he was a fucking liberal, which is to say that, if he were around today, he'd probably be a Trump guy.
The piece is the purest example of the utter howling uselessness of boomer liberalism, the equivocating between the tyrannical federal government and the militia loonies who object to libertarianism because they want to kill the gays. They're the same fucking side, Denis. They're white, male authoritarians who fetishize guns and strength and, given the slightest provocation, they will merge seamlessly into a single fascistic whole, and when you, belatedly, raise a note of objection, when you realize that "country people" coming to power in the US looks just like what you saw in Kabul in 1996, they'll blow your brains out with the rest of the weak. You fucking gormless idiot.
For boomers, "oh I did drugs in the 60s, I'm a-ok with the gays, I've got my lefty bona fides" is an acceptable idea. An entire generation that, except for a handful that morphed into university professors, had no concept of the left whatsoever. The left isn't your private little epiphanies about the self and grace. It's not the space to do so, free of government intrusion. It's a check against the domination of capital; it's democratic control of our lives; it's justice; it's the sole, sad hope we have in the face of extinction. You spoiled, useless, blind, complacent yokel.
This whole collection sells blinkered equivocation as sophistication.
But then, by the time you died, you were probably sitting on a tiny nest egg of your own. All those checks from the Paris Review. I always overcomplicate things. You were a white guy, a reformed junkie, with prestige and capital, who lived among others like you. This is nothing more than class interests. I'm embarrassed I thought it could be otherwise. Tell these assholes you'll take their shit away, whether power or toys, and the mask of centrism drops, revealing pure reaction - the defense of existing hierarchies, atop which they squat. We have to break them.
