American Viscera
Like the vulture, the right-winger is ugly.
I like the smell of carrion in the spring air. I like to see fauna decomposing by the side of the road. Not for its own sake, or to chase some morbid fancy. But because I know that a vulture is on its way to pick it apart.
There is no animal on earth more underrated, if not outright scorned, than the vulture. Despite the grotesque legacy, the vulture cuts a pleasantly serene figure in a wilderness otherwise teeming with anxiety, hostility, and disease. Approach a vulture in the midst of feeding and it will soar, almost languidly, up to the nearest branch or power line. Then it will waft back down once you pass it.
Against nature’s deceptive beauty, the vulture conveys an honest ugliness. The vulture cannot be anything other than itself. It is just there in the ecosystem, subsisting on its refuse.
The vulture is the perfect spirit animal for the American right-winger. Like the vulture, the right-winger is ugly. If not in look then certainly in his bearing and his charisma: awkward and ill-bred, as if he has unlearned every acceptable social grace. He moves easily through a crowd because the crowd gladly clears a path for him toward the nearest, most discreet exit. In a world shot with Kodak Portra film, the right-winger is a badly framed, poorly focused, and somewhat compromising Polaroid.
In fact it is only out of convenience that I describe this human vulture as “right wing.” If I were to be brutally accurate, I’d say that he is simply a political scavenger. He exists some distance beyond what I would obviously call the political predators. These predators may be liberal, they may also be conservative. They are bound in any case by a shared vision of America as a completed object, an absolute unit; everything is provided for, everything is granted. America is something they are ever chasing after. They salivate at its sinews and its grace. But they always catch up to it, sink their teeth into it, consume it down to its bones and whatever meat they are too full to eat. Then they leave it expecting America to leap out from the bushes fully formed, as if it they hadn’t just torn it to shreds.
The right-winger, in true scavenging form, happens on the rotting remains of America and cleans it away. In this respect, America is not a complete object, but something decontextualized and deconstructed. On the one hand it is terribly mangled and chaotic. On the other hand nothing for the scavenger is granted. Nothing is truly useless. No business is truly finished. There are only possibilities before him. The scavenger may take what he finds and apply it as he sees fit. Consider a few examples.
David Lynch was as lacking in any doctrinal consistency as you’d hope from any artist. To possess him in one ideology or another is something one does for online engagement but no serious engagement with his output. Still, that it attracts right-wingers is not surprising. Lynch also lacks the disenchantment and self-consciousness liberals need just to get out of bed, just as he lacks the conservative’s self-restraint. Lynch believes in innocence against corruption. The innocence is unrecognizably pure to most liberals just as the corruption is more overwhelming and vivid than conservatives are comfortable with. His surreal Americana is not some arch put-on but the product of a comfort with and sensitivity to his lifelong surroundings.
If Lynch’s moment is ever renewing, Andrea Dworkin’s moment seems by now to have come and gone. All to the good as that moment was rhetorical in nature, driven by a surface malcontentedness to lift her most savage digs against the left and the right. The malcontents, predators all, failed to appreciate the deeper aim that should always be in the scavenger’s mind. Dworkin questioned whether her allies had equality and freedom exactly right. The former seemed more lopsided and the latter more constrictive. They always found ways to keep women in about the same submissive place in which they’d heretofore been. Her allies seemed more attached to the absolutes than they were to their consequences on the people they were supposed to help. Such is what she confirmed with her anti-pornography initiatives when liberal lawyers and politicians pushed back on them, even going so far as to overturn popular support.
The American punk has a similar attachment to absolutes, preaching empathy and independence without relent, but also without much thought or awareness. There was always more to the American punk than even they seemed to comprehend. Outside of the military there is no more convincing example of discipline and obedience. Outside of religious orders there is no greater sensitivity to rules and ritual. And outside of the university there is no more sincere pursuit of moral clarity and communal cohesion. That a punk had to avow what was preached and conceal what was practiced was perhaps the movement’s most consequential error. But now that practice is abandoned by it like so much shredded viscera, it is now for the scavengers to possess like everything else here mentioned.
It all falls very easily off the bone. But here you might suspect that my scavenger metaphor is beginning to strain. Rightly so. For a weakness of the right-winger is that the eerie dignity so admirable in the vulture is nowhere in evidence in him. And it is not simply that he lacks the animal instincts to regulate his passions. It is, rather, that the passions are an inevitable result of the creative process of political and cultural scavenging. The right-winger sees his carrion in more kaleidoscopic hues. Yet they may not match with the vision of someone else in his species. This is the political scavenger’s tragedy, which the predators never tire of exploiting.
Like America itself, the predator sees the rad hat-toting chud as this absolute unit that is easily comprehended and entirely within their control. They wield it against the quieter right-winger as a cudgel of embarrassment, as if there is such blinding daylight between the two, as if there are is no such thing as a tedious right-wing intellectual, a cagey and pragmatic chud, or a dumber-than-you’d think predator. Even a dog loses its way and finds itself under a perch of vultures who, on this occasion, will make a dietary exception.
The predator wants nothing more than to ensnare the scavenger away from his responsibility. Whether by stoking his embarrassment or getting him to concede hypocrisy as a valid defect of character. All worse outcomes than the messy process in trying to establish common ground between him and the chud. Something must fuse the former’s loyalty with the latter’s agency. It is somewhere in the national viscera on which they both feed. In Lynchian provincialism, Dworkinian skepticism, punk obedience, or any other scrap they pick out. Ultimately they should see eye to eye on the one broad conclusion: America, to be America, relies on assuming a distinct form, or else it has none. Only the scavenger has the vision to realize it. The predator, seeing only a product, will repeat the cycle of consumption, until everyone is eating shit.