Anarchyland

a memoir of the sunken past

Your own small personal experiences of life are always more persuasive than anything else.

—Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

I.

Napoleon believed that a person's politics were fundamentally shaped in young adulthood.

I got my sentimental education among a kind of people who seem extinct now.

Strange squatters with a gleam in their eye and tattered black Iron Maiden shirts who walked barefoot through the broken glass back to their squatted houses in Washington, DC and Baltimore. In Philadelphia, I watched hundreds of them, with their Mad Max bikes and dogs come out for a Mumia Abu-Jamal protest, emerging from little hidden hovels and lairs in the ruins of the city.

To me, they were like Zapatistas come down from the misty mountains or wandering ascetic desert saints sitting in the public squares of Alexandria in the second and third century. Some were on great, romantic Lord of The Rings-style quests to make life an adventure again, walking and hitch-hiking and train-hopping across the remaining forests and backwoods and two-lane roads left in the country, staying far from the superhighways. Some were living in beautiful cob houses in the woods outside of town behind the power substation, with wood-fired, mosaiced open-air bathtubs, the incredible little Ewok villages.

Was this how young Henry Miller felt as he watched the strange transient anarchist and IWW travelers roll in with the dust and set up their soapboxes in the town square—the transients of his youthful personal awakening—or Emma Goldman when she was a wee 17-year-old during the Haymarket Massacre?

The look. The smell. A comforting smell of a certain type of people or house that i will never ever forget. Variations on “the look” have attempted to be recorded and reproduced by subcultural artists and photographers like Mike Brodie, Cristy Road, and Nate Powell, but somehow these variations, these documentary depictions don’t do justice to the truth…

Were the people of that time actually more heroically lonely and THEMSELVES, had they actually been through so much more, EARNED IT, so to speak, more than the people that you meet today, or was it just an illusion of being naive and encountering for the first time as a virgin to the world? I don’t know.

I wanted to be like them—dirty, beautiful, and free, with crumpled photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of the pamphlets containing the truth, the ones that were hardest to find.

There were a few in every town, in Asheville, in Richmond, squatting in a half-abandoned farmhouse down in the swamps of Eastern North Carolina, twenty of them paying $100 a month in an old 10 bedroom manor house with barred windows on the edge of Durham, with overalls and patches and sideways asymmetric haircuts and taped-up glasses, dumpstering, cutting their own firewood, making their own herbal tinctures and grand old soups—and a lot more of them on the West Coast and in the big, historically-leftist cities.

You could immediately tell from the look in the eyes and in the manner of speaking their degree of their education, which ones were actually from middle and upper classes “going to the people” in poor people disguise; and which ones were actually from the very bottom of the world, making community at the bottom of the world (and that great essential dilemma of leftism was there, right in your face: the strident pushy ones building the ideology were from the middle and upper classes, the ones who grew up poor generally speaking tended to be less political, less strident, and less PC).

I can remember all the faces and types at the political meetings and gatherings about “organizing resistance”—the extremely-militant guys with scraggly beard and ponytails and boots, the vaguely-Unitarian-or-Quaker-parented professional activists who tried to keep things positive and looked forward to the drum circles, the scowling very-very-exotic train-punks in all black and overalls, the old communists from the 70s who looked like Utah Phillips, the gender warriors, the polyamorous free-love girls who shocked even our libertarian sensibilities with their casual orgies. Anarchism (like Orwell famously wrote of British socialism) attracted with “magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack… that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

“Characters” were everywhere. There were dozens of them. Tall tales about them. They were known by their “action names” and people spread the wild stories about all the crazy shit they had done and seen. They became our Paul Bunyans and Johnny Appleseeds, neo-Americana mythos, and the tall tales got taller and taller, we talked about them over railroad bonfires and in musty living rooms all over the country.

I think about them all the time. The guy who used a piece of fire hose from a fire truck to hold up his pants. Where are they now? Dead? Exactly the same, wandering the earth like the damned? Reformed and sober and moderated, teaching a yoga class at a fancy studio in Austin?

Just home from work in a button-up shirt sitting down to dinner with their wife and kids?

Why did some go so gray and look so so old and some never seemed to age at all, little vampire Peter Pans?

I didn’t care at all about habits, routines, the chemistry of common life. I wanted life to be passionate in every moment, to be outside it all ordinariness, for it to be extraordinary.

When we got older and a bit more cynical and acclimated to the World-As-Is, we started jokingly referring to the place we had come up in as “Anarchyland.”

In Anarchyland, recognition was bad, large audiences were bad, coherent politics were bad, maximum obscurity and drug and alcohol problems was good, seven inch records only ten people listened to good, rich art girls with that wealthy California cadence of voice slumming it as trisexuals at the punk warehouse for a decade good, looking like absolute shit was good, Profit losing was good, profit making or even breaking even, bad.

Anarchyland was some girl being called out as a racist or negligent about mental health by the other residents of her group house—I think she had parked her car in the best parking spot when the Latino repairman arrived, and oh, her housemates didn’t like that. Anarchyland was the “punk bros” being castigated by the Arch-Feminist-Back-to-the-land-Zine-Writer for having copies of Playboy in the bathroom.

Anarchyland was endless discussions about sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, endless meetings about how to burn down the system and resist and break each other down and rebuild each other and it was also a big cluster of 50 to 100 ratty white kids in hoodies standing around in the dark outside some warehouse in the most rundown, industrial, ghetto part of every city or college town.

Anarchyland was the Upside-Down. When I think about it, I think about the song by some Bloomington, Indiana acoustic psych folk artist whose name I forgot that goes, “welcome to wrong color land.”

It was this cult but also totally-not-a-cult that raised us and shaped our values entirely.

A magical mystical land of enchantment and fun where you never have to grow up and you should probably just hang yourself if you’re 30. Like Mary Martin in the first Peter Pan, the adventure never had to end, all the genders were androgynous and ambiguous, and the goal was to fly out the window and take Wendy and the Lost Boys and whoever else we could with us back to never Neverland.

They, of course, the bitter-clingers, the true believers, would never have accepted it to be called Anarchyland and would be offended right now reading it being described as Anarchyland (and would attempt to penalize anyone so cruel and callous to dismiss it as such), they believed it was The Way and the Truth and The Light and the Beloved Community—the only problem? The only problem is it’s just that not enough people have really heard the message yet; Or they’ve heard it in the wrong way from the wrong people; But they’re coming, soon, always just beyond the horizon, we’re going to wake everyone up and they’re realize what’s really going on.

Anyone who has kids or has made it into their late 30s and 40s can only look back and laugh—taking a difficult shit and then struggling with the plunger as the toilet water rises, sitting on the phone for an hour waiting to chat for the Chase or insurance representative in the Philippines, taxes, trying to get the groceries into the car and up onto the counter then gather up the plastic bags, all the inanities that make up life—but sure, active resistance, passionate existence! Trust your desires! Hahaha.

You know what?

I didn’t know it at the time but I was participating in a laboratory where the new ideology was being built.

We were building it in the basements and warehouses on the edge of town.

The liberals were completely oblivious to concepts like “trans rights” and “mutual aid” and “anti-blackness” and didn’t use words like “harm” and “abuse” and “trauma.”

But in the hidden little protean stew, things were being tested out on a small self-chosen group. Things that weren’t necessarily meant for mass consumption.

II.

I spent most of my teens and twenties and thirties in the subculture.

I got in deep. I was in deep in the milieu. I spent twenty full years of my life in the milieu, chasing its tail.

I spent my days and nights under the neon glow of the Kinko’s, collating and stapling multi-colored $2 zines, $5 Records, $1 tapes, .50 cent patches, making fancy fliers for house shows, for the protests.

This was my whole world. I internalized the entire value system.

Up was down and down was up and that was what we called an ideology and a community.

Like the pearl diver, I put the dagger between my teeth and dove to the bottom, in search of the rarest and smallest pearls, because those were the ones I perceived to have the most value. The rest of the world didn’t seem to care much about rare and small pearls. But I knew the truth.

I’m not the only one who carries around an upside down view of “value” from the mindfuck.

I hear about it all the time from people who had to unlearn all the bullshit when they went back to school or into the workforce and all the values they learned and held in the Upside-Down were non-transferrable to the Cold World.

Like they had been in a cult. Like they were leaving a cult and had to rebuild from nothing. Had to start over from nothing—literally nothing—at 30 or 40.

Those that moved from Anarchyland to a vocation or an education quickly found that the rich and colorful existence and accomplishments that were highly valued in Anarchyland were non-transferrable currency in the real world.

How many people have I known that went through crazy depressions and panic attacks when they had to go back to get their GED or bachelors or make a decent resume when everyone else around them had done that when they were 20, while we were hitchhiking and touring and protesting, and then at 30 or 35 they find they can’t relate to these “normal people” and their lives and interests and concerns. For some, those 15 years in the cult is a source of personal pride, an interesting story to tell, something that makes them unique. For others, it’s a shame and embarrassment to be hidden except when they sense a kindred.

And they can’t relate to these people who are ten years younger than them. And the sad truth about Normie World is that there is no community exactly, life is kind of boring and dull. And routine. They feel critical and disinterested and most importantly above somehow their new set of peers in their MFA program. These people don’t know the reality, the truth.

The main point I’m trying to make is that the time spent in Anarchyland—the years spent in passionate existence—is non-transferrable. It’s like being a crypto Hodler your whole life and then suddenly having to conduct all your economic interactions in fiat currency.

Of course, many creatively manage to reframe the time spent in social-justicey ways—time spent at collectives becomes “permaculture expert” or “organizer” on a resume, or Books-to-Prisoners segues into a non-profit job, or zine writers get jobs at a magazine or book publisher, music people get jobs at Spotify or Bandcamp—but no proper CV. No way to explain the years. “Radical mental health” and other such nonsense flies in Brooklyn and Berkeley and Portland and Seattle, but nowhere else. Many have to fall on the sword and start their vocational retraining from zero at middle age, and this is very tough.

Of the people that leave the cult, most do so in this transitory way where they just get a vocation and slowly their reality shifts and the next thing they know it they’re not someone living in subculture, they’re a normal person with an apartment and kids working at the nuclear plant like Homer Simpson.

For those with the cultural privilege or foresight to get out, the majority enter the media and academia—entering the “institutions” just like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army Boomers did before them—as per tradition. Since you failed and couldn’t actually make revolution, at least you can teach the youth about post-colonialism and sexism.

Then there are those that stay, and they stay for a variety of reasons—the two, forking primary reasons are that some actually do have the vested privilege to leave, but stay because they’re ideologically stubborn, they refuse to change. True for life. And there are others who stay because they literally have nowhere else to go and this has been their everything, it is their entire world and they see no alternate world where they could be who they are or be accepted, so they make their bed where they are—albeit with bitterness that begins to set in because they have been left behind by so many.

Some cling on and threw their lot in with the “community” the belief being that if they stuck around, others would stick around, and a virtuous circle would emerge where the freaky community would stay together and support each other into old age (this is why the band Dead Moon is such an object of fascination for this set—they were lifers, they stuck it through until the end.)

But communities disintegrate by a thousand tiny cuts, a thousand of tiny acts of defection and attrition back to the Normal World (this also happened in the 60s and 70s). When your friend leaves and gets their shit together, you are just a little more likely to leave. And those that remain get more pissy and angry at the world with each passing year as they end up old and bitter and alone and asking everyone “where did they all go?”

Well, they went to live their lives or something, and the stridency probably scared them off.

But have a good time, you, the true, the ones that remain, even though you probably sense it, year after year, the disintegration.

And you say “Ahhhh! Get away! We’re very hidden and special!”

And as it was all dying, its detritus filtered down to a lower political tier, the aging liberals, who caught whatever they could in the rain gutters.

And most of those who leave? Most of them you can’t call “apostates” or “heretics” in any way—they don’t repudiate and denounce or anything, most in fact keep the bulk of the views and ideology, but as they quietly slip away into other lives, like turtles they go back to their native class. Have kids, buy a house, work somewhere, it’s all good man. Saul Goodman.

To start over completely at 30 or 40 is a painful, humbling experience, and I have nothing but respect for those who stuck it out and built a new life for themselves. And from what I can see, their exposure to The Real World humbles them and moderates their previously strident set of beliefs.

They learn they’re just another person making their way through the world. No longer a unique “special” person, part of a special secret handshake DIY community. “Ask a punk” the directions to the location of the fliers of the most DIY shows read.

Get the fucking GED. Go to community college. Build a fucking Linkedin. Get a broker’s license. Go to herbalism school. Go to midwifery school. Learn to use Turbotax.

No one in the real world gives a shit that they lived at that collective house, that they went on tour with _____.

I’m tired and bitter and alone and worn out now, but oh all of it just makes my heart ache. Even after all this time, it’s still my heart.

Out in the storage shed behind my mom’s house, I have plastic CVS boxes full of handwritten letters and crumpled patches and pins and ephemera and yellowing homemade fliers. But I can’t bear to open and look at it all. It’s too painful. Like Frankie Stubbs from Leatherface growls, don’t fuck with… Pandora’s box!

III.

For a brief period of historical and technological time—say 1995 to 2011—it was something quite special. Anarchism was ascendent.

The worst nightmare of any committed denizen of Neverland is that their peers grow up and leave them all alone.

But this is what has come to pass.

There is a terminal demographic decline.

The young people today, those who might have been anarchists in a different time and ambiance, if they’re anything left-ish, they’re furry, anime-loving “Marxists.” The weird Zoomers today, god knows what new type of thing they are into (it’s embarassing to even list out all the potential names they have for themselves) but they are not going to be punk anarchist hardcore zine-loving vegans. Whatever Leftist thing some small percentage of them choose to be, I believe the bulk of these coming generations will mostly be nihilistically apathetic or scary right-wing, rebelling in various exciting new reactionary ways against the identity politics that have been smothering them since birth.

On the one hand, anarchism was saying, “We are the truth and the light and we have the answers for all society.” On the other hand, it was saying, “We are a very rare and obscure and special very special flower and we want to remain marginal and obscure and flower only in the dark, and what we do is so secret.”

There were so many meetings and articles and debates and heated discussions to deal with this contradiction, but no one ever seemed to find an answer.

There is no good answer. There is no good reason a bunch of skinny white kids in balaclavas should be tearing up the gentrified downtown on behalf of the poor black community. It’s the historical contradiction of leftism. As Orwell put it, the base is “the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that.”

And they are always and forever, “kicking against a system theoretically that you are practically very well satisfied with.”

The issue is when you’re over in a little freaky corner muttering, “what we do is secret, very secret” soon the rest of the people—the boring people, the liberals mostly—get curious and come over to poke their little pig snouts into your garden and say, “Sooo ah, what are you doing over here, is it cool, is it new, is it exciting? Can we try it too?”

The liberals discovered Anarchyland. What could be cooler to the most dull, desk-bound NPR indie-media-person than this fascinating underworld of polyamorous relationships, Kimberle Crenshaw, and aggressive property-destruction protest.

I really resent the Ivy-League-educated writers and journalists who lived the most boring Northeastern lives possible but then at 35 or 40 suddenly discover anarchism or polyamory or Burning Man or “another way of life” and all of a sudden become the proselytizer of their new plaything, a thing that we were doing when we were 15 or 18 or 22, before the scales fell from our eyes and we became more pragmatic toward the world.

I don’t resent it just out of some petty “we were here first and you’re late to our cool hidden thing” but more because I think these are childish ideologies well-suited to very young people exploring the world and themselves. I find it deeply embarassing and inappropriate for people who have lived half their lives already in the comfort of social acceptance. Of course, the response to me would be, “Aaron, growing up is just giving up and dying.” But my response would be what Victor Serge wrote in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “The Anarchists—they’re wonderful!—but what an ideology! Suitable only for 14 year old kids!”

Others who are a bit more pragmatic have become embedded in the mainstream culture. Their ideas are everywhere now, after all. Anecdotally speaking, I would say a high percentage of people who grew up in Anarchyland or subculture have gone on to work in white-collar knowledge-economy sectors—they work as lawyers, journalists, writers, political operatives, and in academia—and from these perches they have been able to beam out a moderated version of their worldview to the citizenry. Hell, this is exactly what I did, to a T, attempting the transition from Anarchyland to writing articles about subcultural leftism for mainstream journalism magazines.

Now there are lots of people I used to know who remain fully invested in this type of thing who want to argue with me and say things like, “You know what, I love that the liberals are into it now. Good! I like this new Identity Politics mainstream! Our way of seeing things is really spreading!”

Then they get angry and say: “But you’re just blaming the innocent, good people trying to live and express themselves rather than those evil people who are against them!”

They can’t see themselves, they can’t see their own power to shape things (cultural and political power), they can’t see the other side, and they definitely can’t see that this is just a new ratcheting up of something that has been happening for a long time and it will just go on and on.

VI.

Now I am old and cynical and neutral, more interested in what is normal and good not just because what is normal and good is normal and good because society says so, but because the weight of time has shown it to have some kind of value.

But this was the world that shaped me completely. Even if I can joke about it or be some kind of apostate or have mixed feelings, it remains my North Star because these values have left their mark on me, they are with me.

To me, it is a sunken and mystical place, full of meaning and life. I guess it is my everything, yeah.