Adjustment Day

by Chuck Palahniuk

The smarty-pants academic, Gunnar Heinsohn, theorized that all major political upheavals in history were due to an excess of young males. A “youth bulge,” the savvy kraut called it. Teaching the concept left Professor Brolly breathless with excitement. The basic idea held that if at least thirty percent of a population consisted of males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine—watch out!

Gunnar held that starving people don’t strive for recognition. Likewise, illiterate boys will never recognize how history ignores them. But if the youth bulge is fed, well fed and schooled, they’ll become a pack of ravenous, attention-seeking wolves.

But extra male children craved status, power, recognition, and social position. It was this surge of young men who called themselves secundones—in English, “secondaries.” It was these men who spilled into the New World with Christopher Columbus’s second expedition and became the legions of conquistadores who enslaved and pillaged the innocent Maya and Aztecs.

Clearly, every bad event in human history had been caused by a surplus of cute, young boyfriend material.

“Those who demand peace are the people who already hold power.”

Yet another war to end all wars.

For a time, American officials had kept the lid on this human powder keg by dosing the boys with Ritalin. After that, peace came in the form of endless online gaming and pornography—all covertly supplied by government contractors. Despite those efforts this generation was waking up to its mortality. They wanted more than drugged, time-wasting numbness.

The faster the dead could be honored, the faster they could be forgotten.

This was his secret recipe of Styrofoam ground down to just its little white balls, dissolved in gasoline with Vaseline stirred in to make it thick, to make it sticky so when he sprayed the gunk on the ceiling it never dripped, and when he sprayed it on window glass it didn’t run down. He’d added some paint thinner as a surfactant, his dad explained, to break the surface tension so the ooze wouldn’t bead up but would coat everything more evenly.

Imagine there’s no God. There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only your son and his son and his son, and the world you leave for them.

And as they marveled beneath the chandeliers and craned their necks to see the glory of the murals and the gilded ribs of the lofty domes, they knew that food had built this. Food that could’ve been eaten. Food that had been taken from them. And security had built these marbled stairways, security that could’ve been theirs. And their lives had been siphoned away so that these walls could be paneled with polished mahogany, and rosewood, stuff shipped from around the world to add to the comfort and pleasure of the ruling elite.

And all knew the truth: Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the government rots.

According to Dr. Brolly, our brightest, most-erudite observations owed their existence to poor people trying to unload vintage Avon cologne bottles and unwanted timeshares.

With the passing of newspapers the credibility of everything came into question. No one was dictating or arguing effectively, defining quality from crap, truth from lies. Without a gatekeeper, an arbiter, everything had equal value.

The moment after you passed a test, the facts you’d learned were obsolete.

For schooling had given the people very little in exchange for their money. And the media had given nothing in exchange for the people’s time and attention.

Generations had been taught the worst brands of social engineering; they’d been drilled and tested until these institutional lies had replaced any rational thinking of their own.

Caucasia is at war with Gaysia. Caucasia has always been at war with Gaysia.

A happy past cripples people. They cling to it with nowhere better to go. Nothing to improve upon.

Consider that no one wants you to discover your full potential. The weak do not want to be around the strong. The stagnant can’t bear the company of the vigorously growing.

The weak want you to forgo your destiny just as they’ve shirked theirs.

For hate is a form of passionate attachment, and to be despised seems better than to be unknown.

For it takes everything to be loved. To be loved is to serve as a slave. Hate demonstrates a complete freedom from pleasing others.

Power meant access to anything and everything. Meaning a man wouldn’t need to hustle and hoard. It meant a life unencumbered by back-up plans.

No culture should be held to the expectations and subjected to the withering gaze of another.

It’s living among heterosexuals that makes the homosexual feel abnormal. Only among whites do blacks feel inadequate. And only among homosexuals and blacks do whites feel threatened and guilty. No group should be blighted by the intellectual expectations and the moral yardstick of another.

“Queer bodies have always been the shock troops in Western civilization.”

The boy whom little Adolf had loved in grammar school, he revealed, was Ludwig Wittgenstein, a talented Jew who would mature to become a kind of anti-Hitler, a brilliant philosopher and teacher unafraid to conceal his queer self. Inventor of Wittgenstein’s Duck-Rabbit. As for the night when so many of Hitler’s compatriots were slaughtered, that was the legendary Night of the Long Knives when the Nazi Party purged itself of its founding queer members.

History would always repeat this pattern: Queer foot soldiers blazing the path and being dismissed once the heavy lifting was complete.

The marble dome, washed with floodlights, appeared so like a full moon frozen on the horizon. Like Moloch fed on slaughtered children yet always hungry.

“The queers became artists because nothing they could do in public came naturally.”

From their first awareness, he explained, they’d had to study and mimic behavior instinctual to all others. To survive they needed to observe and remember, and in doing so they’d served as the scholars, artists, and clerics of civilization.

Likewise the blacks had raised families. To survive they’d built careers and businesses. Blacks had established churches and fought as soldiers and set themselves as moral paragons ...

“But identity politics,” Dawson continued, “has reduced the homosexual to nothing but his sexual preference. It has reduced the black to only his skin. And each has beco...

Professor Brolly talked about the culture of the Hellenistic Greeks, how the Greeks had valued comedy above all other theater. Their comedic plays had far outnumbered their tragedies because they believed that all human endeavors looked trivial and laughable to the gods who watched from on high. The gods found mankind endlessly funny.

But when Christian culture supplanted the Greeks, the Christians destroyed most of the comedies. Stories of tragedy reinforced the Christian viewpoint so the church preserved Oedipus the King and Medea and Prometheus Bound and eradicated all that did not celebrate the church’s ideals of suffering and martyrdom.

For the ancient Greeks the absurd was closer to the profound ...

According to anthropologists we laugh out of some prehistoric reflex. When primitive man was prey, when he and his tribe ran in terror from a saber-toothed tiger or whatever, the man who fell would be eaten. For everyone else, his death would occur as a huge relief. According to Brolly all humor arises from escaping death.

After a lifetime of posting on blogs and videotaping his every move and emotion for social media, he was facing nothing less than identity fatigue. There were no more fresh starts. He’d established his brand so thoroughly. Documented himself for posterity. There was no frontier where the Internet hadn’t already told the world all about him since he’d first learned to keyboard.

If humor comes from anything, it arises from an immense feeling of relief.

The American of the formerly united states was constantly held in check. His schooling was comprised of the constant repetition of the same narrative model. In the most classic stories of American fiction, the ones most promoted by critics and the school system, the same fates befall each of three main characters. The meek and obedient destroys himself. The most aggressive and openly rebellious is murdered. And no one except the often mute, yet always watchful character is left behind to recount the story. A suicide. A murder. A witness.

Even a seemingly transgressive novel like Fight Club traced the same pattern. The most inventive aspect of Fight Club was how it collapsed all three of the archetypes. By killing himself, the martyr murders the rebel and by doing so creates an integrated passive/active voice that recounts the story as a new self-aware narrator.

Over and over, the lesson to Americans is not to be too passive or aggressive, but to pay attention and to avoid notice. To escape, to survive and tell the tale.

It brought to mind abandoned animals. The dogs poor people took out to the countryside to dump, hoping household pets could fend for themselves. Starved a few days, those lap dogs and pedigreed mutts always resort to eating the shit of other animals. That shit, laced with the eggs of black flies, eggs ready to hatch out worms. The result being a dumped animal starves all the faster, eating more shit, hatching more mouths to feed, and finally finding a bush, a tree, a fence, but shade enough where a poor animal can collapse, panting, and die.

Only a white man had the inflated self-worth to write that book, and only a white man would have the secret pride to read it.

For the white man, his guilt was his biggest badge of accomplishment. Only whites killed the planet with global warming so only whites could save it. Their boasting never let up. It was the white racket: Creating problems so they could rescue everybody.

The kings of Europe and Asia hadn’t been voted into power. They’d spilled blood, and whoever spilled the most blood gained the most power. The Queen of England and the kings of Sweden and Spain stood atop a mountain of butchered men.

“Why wait tables when a hail of bullets will be your coronation?”

Walter had looked up from his typing. “So this is like Fight Club?” His new old man had shaken his head. He’d asked, “Are you referring to the novel?” “What novel?” had asked Walter. His fingers poised above the keyboard. Talbott had smirked. “Hardly.” He’d said, “Fight Club was about empowering each man through a series of exercises.” His ghastly face shined with its coating of blood. “Fight Club taught each man that he had capacity beyond his greatest concept of himself. Then, it set each man free to fulfill his destiny: to build a house, to write a book, to paint a self-portrait.”

“Palahniuk. All of his work is about castration. Castration or abortion.”