White

by Bret Easton Ellis

If I often wished the world were a different place, I also knew—and horror movies helped reinforce this—that it never would be, a realization that in turn led me to a mode of acceptance.

having gone the night before to the week’s other big opening, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner at

I didn’t know it then, that night in the summer of 1982—this realization actually occurred a few months later—but I had become an adult, and I didn’t need horror movies the way I once had.

Leaving aside everything we now know about toxic masculinity (whatever that is), no ideology will ever change these basic facts that are ingrained by a biological imperative. Why should we be turning away from our sexuality? My

And while it’s nice to feel virtuous, it’s worth considering whether feeling virtuous and being virtuous are actually the same thing.

and that my tweets might have been construed as bordering on insensitive, though that’s exactly what rationality and logic are now often considered in this everyone-is-a-victim culture.

Because of these tweets and a few similar comments, I’ve been accused of being a self-loathing gay man, and I might be a little self-loathing at times—not an unattractive quality, by the way—but it’s not because I’m gay. I think life is essentially hard, an existential struggle for everyone to varying degrees, and that scalding humor and rallying against life’s built-in absurdities and breaking conventions and misbehaving and encouraging whatever taboo is the most honest path on which to move through the world. Sometimes that means making fun of myself or

I shrugged it off and didn’t make a federal case out of it, or call the local chapter of GLAAD. I didn’t even bother to block them. Because once you start choosing how people can and cannot express themselves then this opens the door to a very dark room in the corporation from which there’s really no escape. Can’t they in return police your thoughts, and then your feelings and then your impulses? And, finally, can they police, ultimately, your dreams?

People also listened to one another, and I recall that as a time when you could be fiercely opinionated and openly questioning without being considered a troll and a hater who should get banned from the “civilized” world if your conclusions turned out to be different.

When everybody claims to be a specialist, with a voice that deserves to be heard, this actually makes each person’s voice less meaningful.

was once briefly intrigued by the possibility that the reputation economy might stimulate the culture of shaming—of being more honest and critical than ever—but the bland corporate-culture idea of protecting yourself by “liking” everything, of being falsely positive in order to fit in with the gang, has only grown stronger and more pervasive.

A genuinely inclusive idea of comedy would allow gay dudes to make fun of other gays and whoever else they wanted to, and straight people to make fun of gays or anybody else.

Sometimes the funniest, most dangerous comedy does not reassure you that everything’s going to be okay. Exclusion and marginalization are often what makes a joke funny. Sometimes one’s identity is the punch line. Laugh at everything, or you’ll end up laughing at nothing.

These parents, whether tail-end baby boomers or Gen Xers, now seemed to be rebelling against their own rebelliousness because they felt they’d never really been loved by their own selfish narcissistic true-boomer parents, and who as a result were smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life’s hardships about how things actually work: people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And the response from Generation Wuss was to collapse into sentimentality and create victim narratives, instead of grappling with the cold realities by struggling and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

Anxiety and neediness became the defining aspects of Generation Wuss,

Parents kept begging me to understand how tormented they were by the oppressive insistence to reward their kids constantly, no matter what, and that in doing so they effectively debilitated them from coping with the failures we all confront as we get older, leaving their children unequipped to deal with inevitable pain.

This, however, hasn’t been easy to do because millennials don’t seem capable of accepting this kind of cold-eyed, realistic and sometimes fallow take on themselves. And it’s why Generation Wuss only pleads now, Please, please, please, only give positive feedback, please…

So. Fucking. What. Should any murder be rationalized away because somebody got offended by how an opinion was expressed?

If you’re a smart white person who happens to be so traumatized by something that you refer to yourself in conversation as a “survivor-victim,” you probably should contact the National Center for Victims and ask them for help. If you’re a Caucasian adult who can’t read Shakespeare or Melville or Toni Morrison because it might trigger something harmful and such texts could damage your hope to define yourself through your victimization, then you need to see a doctor, get into immersion therapy or take some meds. If you feel you’re experiencing “micro-aggressions” when someone asks you where you are from or “Can you help me with my math?” or offers a “God bless you” after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it’s triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help. If you’re afflicted by these traumas that occurred years ago, and that is still a part of you years later, then you probably are still sick and in need of treatment. But victimizing oneself is like a drug—it feels so delicious, you get so much attention from people, it does in fact define you, making you feel alive and even important while showing off your supposed wounds, no matter how m...

It’s impossible for a child or an adolescent to move past certain traumas and pain, though not necessarily for an adult. Pain can be useful because it can motivate you and it often provides the building blocks for great writing and music and art. But it seems people no longer want to learn from past traumas by navigating through them and examining them in their context, by striving to understand them, break them down, put them to rest and move on. To do this can be complicated and takes a lot of effort, but you would think someone in that much pain would try to figure out how to lessen it, however great the cost, instead of flinging it at others expecting them to automatically sympathize with you and not recoil with irritation and disgust.

Liberalism used to concern itself with freedoms I’d aligned myself with, but during the 2016 campaigns, it finally hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement that I didn’t want to have anything to do with.

This wasn’t the usual disappointment about election results—this was fear and horror and outrage that it seemed would never subside and not just for members of Generation Wuss, like my partner, but also for real grown-ups in their forties and fifties and sixties, so unhinged that their team hadn’t won they began using words like “apocalypse” and “Hitlerian.” Sometimes, when listening to friends of mine, I’d stare at them while a tiny voice in the back of my head started sighing, You are the biggest fucking baby I’ve ever fucking heard in my entire fucking life and please you’ve got to fucking calm the fuck down—I get it, I get it, you don’t like fucking Trump but for fuck’s sake enough already for fuck’s sake.

In the week after the election, I had a few random dinners with male friends who’d voted for Hillary. I hadn’t voted for anyone, not only because I lived in rest-assured California but also because during the campaign I’d realized I wasn’t a conservative or a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, and that I didn’t buy into what either party was selling. (I’d also thought Bernie Sanders’s platform was impractical to the point of absurdity.) Sometime during that year and a half I had come to understand that I was many different things and none of them fit neatly under the ideology of one party; I disagreed with much of what both candidates said, and sometimes agreed with one or the other, but I was never convinced or swayed by either of them.

A romantic by comparison, I’d never been a true believer that politics can solve the dark heart of humanity’s problems and the lawlessness of our sexuality, or that a bureaucratic band aid is going to heal the deep contradictory rifts and the cruelty, the passion and the fraudulence that factor into what it means to be human.

But in the summer of 2015 something began to distract me, something odd was happening, something didn’t seem right: the mainstream news that I had read and mostly trusted my entire adult life, legacy institutions like The New York Times and CNN, wasn’t tracking what seemed to me a shifting reality. The disparity between what I saw happening on the ground—through social media and other news sites and simply with my own eyes and ears—and what mainstream organizations were reporting became glaringly obvious in a way that it never had before.

What she actually was implying was the sentimental narrative that said white men shouldn’t be allowed to privately criticize anything about Black Lives Matter. She kept ranting, often nonsensically, and though I’d known her for more than thirty years I’d never seen her so angry, so deranged, talking right over us when we tried to explain what we meant, as if it needed any clarifying.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

But this was the full extent of our relationship, which is perhaps how it should have been since I couldn’t get through his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, despite trying to a few times, and found his journalism bloated and minor-key condescending, and thought his Kenyon commencement speech from 2005 was a very special example of bullshit.

“This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life,” a speech some of his staunchest defenders and even former editors have a hard time stomaching, arguing that it’s the worst thing Wallace ever wrote,

I was often at odds with the notion that anyone could really, deeply care about a Tweet in the first place. You tweeted, people screamed, people laughed, you shrugged, everyone moved on—that’s how I initially saw Twitter.

But after a while I realized that Twitter actually encouraged anger and despair—from the overly sincere, the virtue signaler, the dumb-ass, the literal-minded, the humorless.

Post-Empire narcissism differed greatly from Empire narcissism. Eminem was post-Empire’s most outspoken mainstream character when he first appeared in the late ’90s, and we suddenly were light-years away from the autobiographical pain of, say, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, one of Empire’s proudest and most stylish achievements.

Even if you were married and had terrific kids, the dream of living without fake rules and responsibilities, of rejecting the notion of becoming an ideal, a clean and spotless comrade enthralled by groupthink, the dream of being an individual and not just part of some tribe would always survive.

American Psycho was about what it meant to be a person in a society you disagreed with and what happened when you attempted to accept and live with its values even if you knew they were wrong.

Feelings aren’t facts and opinions aren’t crimes and aesthetics still count—and the reason I’m a writer is to present an aesthetic, things that are true without always having to be factual or immutable.

This show was a reminder for me in the summer of 2018 that freedom was ultimately what everyone yearns for, no matter your age, your gender, your race, your identity.

This was why it seemed to many of us in that summer that the Left was morphing into something it never had been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology beyond its blanket refusal to credit an election in which someone they didn’t approve of had, at least legally, technically, won the White House. The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.

However, my friend and I were both well aware that we resided quite comfortably in what was now referred to as the bubble of white male privilege. Perhaps from certain angles this was true, but I didn’t consider any of whiteness or maleness defining aspects of my identity—or at least hadn’t been overly conscious of this (a fact, by the way, I can’t do anything about).

Still, along with millions of other white men, I was increasingly reminded by a certain faction, that we should be defining ourselves by our white identity because that was itself a real problem. Actually, this faction demanded it, without bothering to recognize that identity politics of any kind might be the worst idea in our culture right now, and certainly one that encourages the spread of separatist alt-right and all-white organizations.

I figured that you might not like someone’s politics or even his or her worldview but could still learn something useful and then move on.

But if you look at everything only through the lens of your party or affiliation, and are capable of being in the same room only with people who think and vote like you, doesn’t that make you somewhat uncurious and oversimplifying, passive-aggressive, locked into assuming you are riding the high moral tide, without ever wondering if you might not, in the eyes of others, be on the very bottom?

The country often felt like a demented high school where the losers in the student body were throwing everything they could at whoever had been elected class president just to see what might stick, at every turn undermining him as well as the students who’d voted for him.

Some of my podcast followers suggested that by complaining about leftist hysteria I was practically Rush Limbaugh incarnate, that I was an alt-right pro-Trump weirdo, that it was all garbage, it was disgusting, it was unbearable. And so here we were: the opinion of someone was unbearable. This was the stance now. And also an extreme, ludicrous violation of free speech, much as policies deemed unlikeable were misconstrued as immoral. The relentless Hitler and Nazi comparisons were especially repugnant since my stepfather, a Polish Jew in his seventies, had as an infant, lost his family to the Holocaust, and I no longer could even pretend to sympathize with this hysteria; even as a metaphor, it was weak and basically moronic. However, my socialist boyfriend, whom I often accused of liberal fascism, now believed that my obsession with aesthetics had become, by the summer of 2018, essentially fascist as well.

Everyone had a personal opinion, his or her own hot take on reality, and very few seemed to have the gift of neutrality, of being able to look at the world in a naturally calm, detached manner, from a distance, unencumbered by partisanship. Bias was everywhere. As an ironist I rarely got distracted—as happened above—by media spin, but if Sean Hannity on Fox presented a worldview that sometimes felt like a puffed-up fantasy aligning with the administration—and sometimes it didn’t—then Rachel Maddow on the opposite side of the aisle at MSNBC, with her own labyrinth of arcane theories every bit as aligned to her audience’s worldview, seemed pretty similar. Weren’t they both, on one level, just smug partisan hacks?

This divide was highlighted everywhere, and in one week that August I had two separate conversations with older women I knew, both in their seventies, both in the same socio-economic class, both white and college-educated, one from the East Coast and the other from the West. One of them told me that Trump frightened her so much she could barely think straight most days, while the other one told me that Trump was probably the greatest president of her lifetime. And each thought it was time to bring out a straitjacket for the other.

With fewer and fewer corporations now running the show, (and soon it might just be one) fellow comrades might need to adhere to their new rulebook: about humor, about freedom of expression, about what’s funny or offensive. Artists—or, in the local parlance, creatives—should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. We could, but not if we wanted to feed our families. This new policy required you to live in a world where one never got offended, where everyone was always nice and kind, where things were always spotless and sexless, preferably even genderless—and this is when I really started worrying, with enterprises professing control over not only what you say but your thoughts and impulses, even your dreams.

This was Kanye at his most lucid, and this afternoon confirmed for me that he was, in fact, sane: his own man, no apologies, and not some drugged-out freak gibbering on Twitter. People simply needed to acknowledge—not approve or to embrace—that here was someone who saw the world in his own way, and not according to how other people thought he should see it.

Or maybe when you’re roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgment, and then comes common sense. And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom.