Hello everyone! A simple but meaty MAR today: a Mithra pic and four reviews! Get stuck in!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
Patchett, Bel Canto
Niven, Ringworld
Chafkin, The Contrarian
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Printer Gargoyle
REVIEWS
Patricia Lockwood, “No One Is Talking About This” (2021) (read aloud by Kristen Sieh) - Well… I listened to this at a time where a fair few things came together for me. Whatever other effects this confluence had, it has made me very, very impatient with this book. I am informed, by people whose taste I respect, that Patricia Lockwood is a very talented writer, largely on the strength of her memoirs “Priestdaddy,” which I perhaps will one day read. I could see glimpses of it in this work, a smooth prose style and bits of humor. I have also been told she is a “master of Twitter.” This is probably part of the problem. I did not enjoy, like, or respect this book.
A friend of mine — a friend I’ve known exclusively online, if that matters, one I’ve known for years and shared writing and other intimacies with — did something extraordinarily self-destructive recently. His stated motivation for so doing, the way he went about it, and the formats in which he informed his friends, all simultaneously critiqued and reflected the sort of internet zeitgeist that seems to be one of the main topics of contemporary literary attention. His critique, and what he did in response, struck home not just for his perspicacity, though he is quite perceptive, or the extremity of his action, though it was quite extreme. It also struck home because at bottom, he and I are in similar positions- failed writer/intellectuals. People flinch from that word, “failed,” “failure” (like a certain other “f” word that I freely self-apply, “fat”). They point to my accomplishments, and they — I — point to his. They’re real. But there’s also no getting around the fact that neither my friend nor I can make a living from writing, academia, or any of the other societally-approved venues to cash out wordy oddballs.
So much for the material! I usually play straight man to this friend. In our dynamic, based as it is on discussing ideas and aesthetics, I’m the stolid one, considering the implications, striving for consistency, trying to be “real,” he’s the zany one, throwing such mundane concerns to the wind, even to the point where he’d dispute this characterization. No pigeon hole for him! Maybe this is the way to put it: I make statements; he makes gestures. Another way to put it: we discussed depression, once, and he told me some facts about narcissistic depression, the depression of people capable of making flashy gesture and big deals out of themselves (as you can tell, my psychological vocabulary is… impoverished), whereas my depression, my family’s depression, was more the self-obviating kind.
This friend would try to destroy himself all over again, I bet, before he accepted any kind of descriptor that said he, and his attempted last performance, were part of any kind of zeitgeist. Well, he doesn’t have to accept it. The thing that made me most angry as I read through his lengthy manifesto was the unsaid thesis: that he is above the real, above the quotidian. I answer emails about 3D printer failures forty hours a week, and try to eke out time for what I care about — writing, reading, organizing, fun time with friends and family — when I can. I can live with my failure to be a professional writer, and try to convert it into success, and this dude…
Well. This is not a request for an explainer on the realities of depression and suicide. I get it, please believe me, intellectually at least, and you’re hardly going to get me to grok it emotionally more than the last week or so already has, so please, please don’t try. Among other things, and here it’s hard to see how much my friend “meant it” — he is a long-term practitioner of the “Schrodinger’s Joke” — but his manifesto included instructions for his posthumous acclaim.
He’s not a “get famous or die trying” guy, exactly (he has invested a lot of energy in being hard to pin down). That’s made explaining this difficult, when I’ve tried to talk about what’s going on to other friends. I think it would be fair to say he is a “live in extraordinary fashion or try to die in extraordinary fashion” guy, or was, anyway. Surviving the experience seems to have woken him up to the fact that people care about him, and that living like the rest of us relatively-normie scrubs might indeed be preferable to death and mutilation.
So, getting back to “No One Is Talking About This” (including me for the last thousand plus words, hey-o!), it’s not a fame thing, exactly. It’s not an internet thing, exactly, though most of my friend’s relationships seem to take place there, and a good portion of his friend network do appear to be internet-damaged millennials. It’s a hands-up-thrown refusal of concrete reality that can’t, even, really commit to its own lack of commitment. That’s what I see, both in internet discourse and in the discourse about the discourse. Half-digested nth-generation tropes from continental ding dong philosophers who barely even meant it themselves, circulated and recirculated like old coins until even the names wear off… glibly talking like nothing is real and nothing is worth speaking seriously about even as they milk everything from derogated social media platforms to climate catastrophe for cheap bathos… well, my friend wasn’t down with that, either. And in his attempted final act, he tried to put some chits on a commitment, of sorts. But a commitment to what, exactly?
“No One Is Talking About This” is about an unnamed female narrator who becomes moderately famous via “The Portal,” i.e., Twitter, but, like seemingly everyone else who is connected to said social media platform, is unsure whether she likes it or hates it. It certainly has a profound effect on how she processes reality and communicates with others! This is gotten across in the text through a first half dominated by little vignettes, tweet-length remarks, no real plot, less “nods” or “winks” at James Joyce and more just Lockwood pointing openly at Joyce and saying “yeah, I’m doing that, but more so, because our TIME is just more so, you know?”
We do get a pivot to something like the real, due to a family crisis. The narrator has a family, the family has a crisis. It’s not really a plot, but it’s something other than a social media scroll (self-conscious, because, you know, we’re all so self-conscious now!!). That’s the thing… they really can’t manage either, these “we live in discourse hell” writers, whether fiction writers like Patricia Lockwood and Lauren Oyler or the legion of nonfiction commentators that shade into the overly-online people on your feed. They can’t do the all-pretend world that some cyber-boosters of the eighties and nineties promised, but they can’t really do the real, either. And they’ll insist that their inability mirrors a human inability, or at least a contemporary inability… and they’re not wrong. It’s an old theme and it’s been done reasonably well. What’s real, how much do our feelings determine at least the subjective reality of experience versus what’s “actually” in front of us blah blah blah.
Look- I’m not some “I fucking love science” dork or an objectivist. I’m a reader, trying to read something interesting. And “discourse hell” isn’t cutting it anymore, to the extent it ever did, and pivoting to noticing how hard it is to take a family tragedy totally seriously because you spend too much time online- that’s not gonna get you over, not with me, anyway. Maybe I should be able to do it. Maybe this really is “the human condition,” with an earned definite article and everything. Maybe every rejoinder I could make to that is a cliche about how we should read about Bangladeshi factory workers instead (it isn’t, but the internet smallfolk can make you feel that way, when they’re all saying the same shit- we are social apes, after all), maybe I’m the stupid, blockheaded socialist realist next to the beautiful thoughtful modernists in the thirties tableau (the latter already on their way to neoconservatism but later for that).
But I don't think that’s how it is.
I said there was a confluence of factors that, perhaps unfairly to Lockwood, rendered me incapable of enjoying or respecting this book. One was my friend’s situation. Another, longer-term one, is that I am, sort of, recovering from depression. I’ve felt better the last few years than I have in a long time. Life is far from perfect, but I experience more feelings (and I’ll say it- whatever set me up for success in terms of family and friend support and talk therapy, antidepressants landed the most important blows). One of those is anger. I’ve gotten used to suppressing it, got used to thinking of it as a self-indulgent gesture of my adolescent self (which, when I was an adolescent, it often enough was). But let’s put it this way: I experience anger as impatience. And I can still be very, very patient, when the thing I am being asked to contribute is just time, or honest effort.
My patience for dishonesty, though, is gone. My patience for glibness is gone. Worn through. My patience for bullshit is mostly gone, the only thing keeping it from being entirely effaced is an appreciation for funny bullshit. You can do what you want. You can be as glib as you want, act as though it’s all just performance and I’m just doing a dishonest (hypocritical!) glibness myself. You can “cringe” (there, using it as a verb, not an adjective, like we’re supposed to). You can fuck off, or not. But I’m not doing it anymore. Not with Lockwood, who is intermittently funny but not funny enough, not here, and not with you.
Because on top of whatever else it is — genuine cris de coeur over authenticity! Artistic expression of your experience! Funny memes! — the glibness of the “we live in the hell of discourse” thing is intensely disrespectful. It does not live in peace, as I would live in peace with the internet people. It oversteps, by nature. It disrespects life, disrespects effort, personally disrespects everyone who tries to live something better than a shitty day on any given “hell site.” And they generally haven’t even got the integrity to admit that they are spitting in your face. A number of internet strangers recently, and at least one or two IRL acquaintances, have behaved disrespectfully to me, impugned my intelligence and my integrity, and, my patience gone, I asked or told them to stop, and I got earfuls about my “defensiveness.” “U mad, bro?!” gone to therapy. Fuck off. I see you, and I’m not playing. Not now, not anymore.
Ironically, my self-destructive friend discussed a fair amount of what I’m saying now in an essay of his on… well, notionally on David Foster Wallace, but really on the whole literary scene circa 2010, around when it was written. His major thesis is that because hipster writers (this is back when hipster discourse was a thing) live such cushy lives that they have no real suffering to write about, and so write about a fake suffering, the feeling of inauthenticity. I have a number of friendly critiques of that article but I think, if anything, the situation has degenerated since then, even if we’ve made the relative advance of ditching hipster discourse. Now, books like this one, and “Fake Accounts” and o tend to imagine many others, somehow manage to be “about” ever less, and to be corrosively hateful to even the possibility of being about anything at all, and somehow, somehow! managing to dump themselves into the same old same old of familial sentimentality or careerist pseudo-heroism in the end.
I can agree with the internet scribblers about this much- it is a discouraging picture. But I have a better solution than they have- turning the fucking page. The exigencies of my reading scheduling, a fun little game for me, has led to my next audiobook being about the Armenian militants who hunted down and shot the Turkish pashas who led the genocide against their people. A perfect palate-cleanser!
I turned definitively against this book after Lockwood, culminating a series of little jokes about how being political is stupid — I get the impression she is meant to be a somewhat serious leftist, who knows, I don’t care — belittled people’s reactions to the killing of Heather Heyer at Unite the Right in Charlottesville. A good friend of mine was a medic on the scene. She split a vuvuzela in half to manufacture a splint for someone’s broken leg. Why are we telling the story of some dumb internet’s person inability to be honest about the situation, again? Why are we telling it over and over again? I don’t care what a commie you think you are, this whole fucking business is fash nonsense.
What did we do when the altright manifested itself out of the discourse? We — the actually committed, the ones who know we’re imperfect and fucked up and still drag our asses out into the productive real, no matter how “cringe” it makes us — dragged it into reality and we kicked the shit out of it and now, no one, not even Richard Spencer, will admit to being altright. There’s still fascists, and we’re working on them, but that bridge burned, because we burned it. That’s the reality I’m interested in. That’s the reality I live in, and I’m not going to take disrespect for living in it, even — especially — if it’s sly, sneaky disrespect that acts like I’m just being “defensive.” Lockwood gets an extra half star over her rival, Oyler, for being funny, sometimes. But I’m done. Quite done. **
Ann Patchett, “Bel Canto” (2001) - The main question this book raised for me was this: how to describe and rate a novel that has flawless prose, from sentence level to plot construction, but that is also, fundamentally, a little boring? That takes something notionally exciting — a hostage situation! wealthy socialites held by third world guerrillas! — and makes it, mostly, a site of examination for the personal regrets, cares, and in some cases growth of some of the hostages and hostage-takers?
Fine prose is one of the keys to Ann Patchett’s reputation. Another is her real lack of pretense. She hasn’t even got that sort of stuck up pretense of rebellion a lot of writers who manage to escape more conventional pretense wind up displaying. What you see is what you get. Patchett didn’t promise a deep, searing examination of the causes or effects of terrorism, of social stratification, or of anything else. She didn’t promise literary experiment. She told a story, and on a prose level, told it with unrivaled grace. There’s not even really any kind of prose pyrotechnics: just very clear, effective, elegant writing, every word in place.
There’s a theme, which is love. Love is put in extremis here. First, it’s a rich man’s love of opera. A Japanese executive, one of the richest men in the world, lets a small, impoverished Spanish-speaking nation bait him to a pitch meeting that the businessman doesn’t take seriously by getting the world’s greatest soprano to sing for him. The businessman is a big opera guy, you see. Once the terrorists take the dinner party over, love of art gets contrasted with the desire of the terrorists for revenge for various bad things their regime did, and the meaningless deaths that result. But the protracted siege allows hostage and hostage taker to come to some understandings. Love blossoms across these lines, and along them, little gesture of kindness depicted by Patchett with minute fineness and great emotional intelligence, especially for a scenario that could lend itself to laughable romanticism. The violence of the state comes along to take its own tax on love and humanity, but it goes on… for some, anyway.
Well… it’s not a bad plot. I didn’t find it especially compelling, especially as the characters, while elegantly sketched and differentiated, also weren’t super-interesting, and only had a limited range of action, given the circumstances Patchett put them in. I guess my main critique was that it’s almost too smooth. There’s no real “biting point,” nothing to chew on. Me and my eating metaphors! Surely, Patchett deserves a great deal of credit for her chops, in any event. ****’
Larry Niven, “Ringworld” (1970) - The “soft versus hard” distinction in science fiction, like a lot of similar guidelines, should not be taken too seriously or schematically. Among other things, some of the most distinguished hard scifi writers can’t quite keep themselves from one or another magic-like technology: faster than light travel, various unobtaniums. And why shouldn’t they? Especially the “golden age” writers, who lived through so many technological developments that would have seemed like magic when they were kids? To me, the distinction seems to be more about what bases writers use for their speculation.
So, despite faster than light travel and various super-materials, I think it makes sense to call Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” hard scifi. I say all that less because the distinction is that important in and of itself, but because this is paradigmatic of the kind of scifi that begins with an engineering concept and works it’s way out from there. Larry Niven basically decided to one-up his buddy, the scientist Freeman Dyson. Dyson came up with the “Dyson sphere,” where super-advanced spacefaring civilizations could use all the matter not otherwise in use in their solar systems to encircle their suns in shells of matter, thereby absorbing all of the sun’s energy and unlocking limitless technological potentials (for everyone to sit around and browse the internet all day, later writers insisted). Niven said, why bother with the shell? Why not just a ring? A ring that encircles a star, with about the radius of Earth’s distance from the sun. You could implant all kinds of habitats on it and spin it. Bingo- trillions of square miles, all the room you’d need.
Ring habitats have since become a trope in science fiction, so I maybe didn’t have the same sense of wonder readers were supposed to get at the sheer scope of the idea when I read it (or the same feeling that the perspective characters were supposed to have encountering it). We only get to the ring about halfway through the book. First, a crew must be recruited by a member of a weird old muppet-looking alien race. It includes a member of a cat-people race whose culture is basically Klingon, and two inhabitants of post-scarcity spacefaring Earth, a bold rational enterprising man and a naive sexy lady who may or may not be preternaturally lucky. The muppet-alien wants to know what the deal is with an astronomical anomaly (in keeping with classic scifi, every alien race has one main characteristic, and for the “puppeteers” as they’re known, it’s caution that shades into cowardice). That anomaly is the ring.
Messed up by its automated defenses, the crew crash lands on the ring. The creators of the ring — or anyone with anything near the technological know-how to create such a stupendous artifact — are nowhere to be found. There’s oceans the size of planets, a massive eye construct, deadly laser plants, villages full of primitives who worship engineers as gods, etc. In order to get home, the crew needs to find out what happened to the “Ringworld engineers,” as they’re known. So there’s a whole series of adventures they have to go through to figure stuff out, the various alien representatives bickering all the while. Many of the adventures serve more to show off the features Niven came up with for his world — giant rotating shades to create the illusion of night and day! Hyperfast elevators to the top of the walls of the ring that the engineers could use! — than to advance the plot.
This was pretty fun scifi. Not mind-blowing, far from enlightened attitudes (especially about gender and about progress), but basically enjoyable. I’m aware Niven was one half of the genocide-fantasy-pair Niven and Pournelle and a big right-wonder, backer of Reagan’s “star wars,” and if you know how to read that stuff back it shows up here. There’s that weird sort of social-technological darwinism, that the most rational and enterprising people (ie, those most like scifi protagonists, ie, those most like how a lot of scifi writers fondly imagined themselves) develop the best tech so they beat everyone else, only laid low by cosmic accident, etc. Stick to that too rigorously and you can wind up some odd places. Still, it was pretty good for a recreational read. ****
Max Chafkin, “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power” (2021) (read aloud by Will Damron) - I'm a little behind on reviews. This was a pretty good audiobook about a juicy subject, but god help me if I'm not stuck on one weird thing. Journalist Max Chafkin, in relating the story of billionaire tech investor and political wirepuller Peter Thiel's childhood, to portray the boy Thiel as bullied. California in the seventies, Peter Thiel a weird, hostile, skinny nerd, not hard to believe. That said, the one example anecdote Chafkin could pull out was some of Thiel's high school classmates going around their town, stealing "for sale" signs, and setting them up on Thiel's house's front yard in the night. They then asked Thiel when he got to school "hey, you're moving?!"
I mean... that doesn't sound that bad? That actually doesn't sound bad at all? Sounds kind of goofy? Maybe if there was an implied threat, like, "you better leave town," but Chafkin didn't imply there was, and probably wouldn't leave it unsaid if there was.
Beyond it just sticking in my head, why do I lead with this? Ultimately, I tell this story because it illustrates the ways in which Thiel was shaped -- and then went on to shape himself -- the myths and lacunae of late capitalist culture in the US. More than a bullied kid, Thiel seems like one of those kids who just doesn't like anything, someone who never outgrew a sort of infantile colic (I've known kids like that- and other kids do wind up bullying them, in part because damn near any interaction with kids afflicted that way turn out to be experienced as bullying). It's not quite depression, at least not as I know it, just a general disdain for and dissatisfaction towards the world. His parents, German immigrants, sound unpleasant, but not abusive. Who knows how people get that way? But "bullied nerd makes good, takes revenge" is part of the Silicon Valley myth. Thiel probably believes it- Chafkin, normally pretty perceptive, might have gotten taken for that ride, too.
I've been thinking a lot about Generation X lately, for my birthday lecture. They all thought they got dealt a pretty shitty hand, and it didn't help that many of them came of age during the recession in the late eighties/early nineties, but really, it was about as good a time as any for a superficially smart white American with ideas and grudges. Thiel didn't start out as a tech guy. He started out as a politics guy. In eighties Stanford, he edited a review, like the ones Anne Coulter had at Cornell and Dinesh D'Souza had at Dartmouth, dedicated to ponderous conservative essay-writing next to brazen bigoted provocation. More than promoting any policy agenda, Thiel just hated the culture around him, though even that is more myth than reality. Thiel said his issue was the permissiveness, hedonism, and lack of standards supposedly inherited from the sixties counterculture. But like... at Stanford? The most preppy school in Northern California? It wasn't that countercultural, never was. Maybe hedonistic, in a lightweight collegiate way, but still. The point is, Thiel hated, and put himself in the script that allowed that hate to flourish.
He became a corporate lawyer in New York and tried to get into higher-end political law by clerking for federal judges. At some point he got sick of it, went back out west, and started a hedge fund. This was the mid-nineties, and one of his investment fields was online payment systems. You could say Thiel has a decent nose for opportunities. You'd probably be right, but again, it's possible to overstate, and he's banked on some weird shit over time too. Part of his motivation to look into moving money online was his anti-statism. He was a big fan of Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon," all about daring tech entrepreneurs chasing gold to make a non-state crypto-currency (I read that book myself several times as a teenager- these days, I'd say it's mid-rank Stephenson). Eventually, all of this led to PayPal.
One interesting point Chafkin makes is the inflection point Thiel's rise represents in internal Silicon Valley culture. There was always a ruthlessness there- it's capitalism, and the military-industrial complex always had a major hand in the tech industry. But it was, if not tempered, then modulated by countercultural values and promises. Hippie bullshit didn't stop Steve Jobs from being a dick to all and sundry (until some genius convinced him he could stop cancer with juice); it did stop him from crowing about it, and perhaps inflected the culture around his businesses, making for a mellower corporate culture. Chafkin depicts Thiel, whose original bugbear was hippies, as leading the turn away from this ethos, to the "move fast and break stuff" era. The counterculture-cyberculture lineage had a vision of a sort of techno-pastoral idyll as the end point - the anarcho-capitalist Thielian vision is more like rolling around a blasted Earth in a robot body, absorbing hippies and other lesser breeds for the energy in their blood. Ironically, both are meant to be visions of liberation.
Chafkin entertainingly relates the twists and turns in Thiel's career. He fucked over Elon Musk -- Musk spoke on the record about Thiel to Chafkin, seemingy in tones of wistful regret "but make it stupid" -- and Meg Whitman at Ebay and whoever else he felt he could get a dollar out of. It's a mistake to make too strong of a distinction between the hacker as hippie and the hacker as hateful nerd: both take glee in breaking rules, and Thiel certainly did plenty at PayPal. Say what you want about Apple, but it did and does make a product that people want, that's different from what came before. Thiel was a pioneer of that other way to make a bundle: backdoor deregulating an industry, destroying competitors through the competitive advantages unpunished rule-breaking gives you, and establishing a monopoly. That's what PayPal did, up to and including facilitating fraud and burning through millions of dollars of venture capital to lose money to hook people on their product. This is what a number of later Silicon Valley unicorns, most of which Thiel invested in, did and do as well- Uber, Airbnb, on and on.
It's another myth, the myth of disruption. Disruption "works" in the sense of "succeeds" -- within the structures we live in, you can make a lot of money doing it. Maybe that's the typical Gen X thing- acting like exploiting what we already have is the supreme genius, and that trying to create something fundamentally different is the ultimate stupidity. In any event, Thiel also sought to "disrupt" politics. He took the same view of establishment politics as he did of the likes of Meg Whitman- Thiel may be pro-capitalism, but he hates most successful capitalists for being office creatures, not Randian entrepreneurial supermen like himself. There's a conspiracy, you see, of intellectuals and administrators -- the bad kind of nerds -- to lord it over both normal people and, crucially, entrepreneurs and visionaries (good nerds, for those keeping score) through rules, regulations, and encouraging cultural values inimical to the people who (supposedly) create value. Thiel, and other Silicon Valley right-wingers like Balaji Srinivasan and Thiel's court philosopher, Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin, think they can disrupt this government/academia/corporate complex the same way Uber disrupted taxis. Any other supposed “conservative” or “libertarian” (Thiel has been a great helper to government power) values they might have take second place to winning the war against the people they think look down on them and stopped them from, I don’t know, become space lords or something.
As it turns out, Thiel could do a lot in that vein, but not enough to satisfy. He could destroy Gawker for its cheek in covering him negatively (also, for violating his privacy in the matter of his sexuality -- he was partially in the closet when Gawker publicly wrote about him being gay -- but it seems clear he would have gone after them anyway). And he invested in Donald Trump's political career back when everyone thought the alliance between the Silicon Valley giants and the Democratic Party would last forever. That's one of his bigger "everyone thought he was crazy but he was right" moments. He celebrated the victory alongside his friend, openly racist blogger Moldbug Yarvin.
It wasn't really to be, though. Disrupt something big enough, and you can't control it. Something the old hippie capitalists could have told Thiel- at times, you need to surrender control, blah blah surfing, etc etc taoism. Needless to say, Trump's personal style and that of Thiel did not mesh. Thiel didn't succeed in his big goal of appointing his people on to various regulatory boards, in order to "destroy the administrative state" or whatever, really stick it to those bad nerds. You have to wonder... does he really not notice how sickly the regulatory state was already? Maybe half a regulatory state makes people even madder than a real one... but in any event, Trump couldn't do whatever it is Thiel wanted him to do.
The world still irks Thiel. It makes sense, because the world still has the source of all of Peter Thiel's troubles in it, in the form of Peter Thiel. He can't understand that, though, so he has to pour everything into narcissistic fantasies: New Zealand bugout bunkers, seasteading, life extension. Thiel's on record as saying that he sees death as the ultimate evil. Revealing my own personal biases, there are few postures I respect less than an exaggerated fear of natural death. Especially from someone, like Thiel, who quite clearly does not actually enjoy life! So yeah, uhh, this dude sucks. The way he sucks is interesting, somewhat. One funny thing about contemporary life: we've put so much power at in the hands of so few people, and have ensconced hierarchy and elitism so thoroughly in the structures of life, that there's a certain extent to which a few key people really are crucial to the functioning of many key bodies, organizations, and movements. Get rid of Trump, Musk, Thiel, and it's pretty clear there's no replacement, not really- someone can take their offices, but not their mana. It's not because they're actually that smart, talented, or even charismatic. It's just a function of how power works, now. You'd figure people would draw some obvious strategic conclusions from that... but that's not Chafkin's job, here. ****'
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Printer Gargoyle
She loves to squat on the printer!
That was an A+ rant... reminds me of the "ironic fascism" crowd that has gathered around the Red Scare girls in NYC... there's nothing there to be ironic about, in my opinion.