As 2021 crashes and caterwauls its course to a conclusion, I am obligated as a blogger (blogligated, if you will) to reflect on the year in review. I spent more time than usual in the hospital over the last 12 months, and as a result I had a chance to do even more reading than normal! Regrettably, not every book I dragged myself through was a winner.
In fact, because I am doing research for a forthcoming (by
2025 at the latest) nonfiction book, much of what I read was either directly or
tangentially related to fascism and harmful new religious movements / cults!
That meant an unusually high proportion of terrible bullshit in my literary
diet. Consider this post the bezoar removed from one of my four stomachs by a
surgeon-priest. For the sake of picking five and not sending everyone shrieking
for the exits, I’ve confined myself to books that *are not overtly fascist.*
That’s why, say, Julius Evola’s Handbook for Right-Wing Youth or literally
anything by Freidrich Nietzsche aren't addressed here. Without further ado: the five worst books I
read this year!
5) The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple,
by Jeff Guinn
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this general
survey of the life of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple or its description of the
nauseating, murderous nightmare of November 18, 1978. And that’s exactly what’s
wrong with it; it passes for a proper, well-researched history. I’d taken
extensive notes from Guinn’s book and, essentially, trusted that he had his
facts right. His solid prose, occasionally morbid and fascinating descriptive
passages, and supposed reference to many sources of information made me believe
Guinn’s narrative of Jonestown.
This is unfortunate, because (as I found out by reading other
Jonestown books) Guinn gets some very basic facts wrong in an utterly
damning fashion. What year did Jones move from the United States to the Peoples
Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana (AKA Jonestown)? Not the year Guinn says!
What about the chronology of Peoples Temple activities in Redwood, Los Angeles,
and San Francisco in California? Or Jones’ relative success or failure in
wriggling his way into Bay Area politics? Guinn fucks that up too! I imagine
that Guinn’s justification for these errors would be that he was trying to
provide a brief, punchy summary rather than an exhaustive retelling.
Well, fuck you, Jeff Guinn, and the big-ass royalty checks
you rode in on!
(NOTE: If you want to learn about this topic, there is still
no better book than Tim Reiterman’s Raven. Not only was Reiterman there –
he was one of the survivors of the airstrip shooting that killed Congressman
Leo Ryan and touched off the massacre – he was also one of the few journalists dedicated
to figuring Jones out in the years before the disastrous 1978 Guyana visit by
Ryan, Reiterman, and company. It’s a hell of a book, one of the best nonfiction
accounts of a tragedy I’ve ever read. Pick
it up today.)
4) Black Magic in Science by Helena P. Blavatsky
Holy cow can Helena Blavatsky go fuck herself! While
I consider the entirety of her oeuvre to be noxious bullshit with ruinous
consequences for cultures the world over (seriously – from Adolf Hitler to
Shoko Asahara, the now-executed former head of Aum Shinrikyo and the mastermind
of the Tokyo Subway sarin attacks, you’ll find Blavatsky’s fingerprints on a
baffling number and variety of atrocities).
Not only was Theosophy (her creation)
responsible for the mainstreaming of the “secret subterranean society”
and “ascended masters”
myths, the movement also brought the concept of “Hyperboria”
(land of magical white people) to Western thinkers, along with Blavatsky’s
appropriative, simplistic, and mangled version of Eastern thought. Scratch a New
Age cult – any New Age cult – and Blavatsky is likely to be right there
beneath the surface.
Black Magic in Science is one of her shorter and
punchier offerings (properly considered, it’s more of a longform essay than a
book, but I’ve included it here because who’s going to stop me – you?). It’s
exactly the sort of snide, intentionally dumb misunderstanding of science and
wholesale rejection of same that you’ll find in the subsequent work of assholes
ranging from Aleksandr Dugin to top-notch “channeler of ancient spirits and
ascended masters” J.Z.
Knight. Thanks a boatload, Helena!
3) Pale Horse Rider by Marc Jacobson
It’s rare that I feel a book has betrayed me. I think most
readers are familiar with this phenomenon. Unless you are aware that what you’re
reading is pure poison (which, to be honest, is the case with most of my
reading these days), reading is to some extent an act of trust. You let an
author take your hand and lead you where they will. I’m not saying that reading
means one must abandon one’s critical faculties; quite the contrary, I think
the biggest betrayals writers perpetrate involve keeping most of one’s
cards on the table to numb a reader’s critical faculties, and then sneaking a
nasty surprise out of one’s sleeve at the last moment.
This can be appropriate and, indeed, effective in fiction.
Where you don’t want it is in nonfiction books about extremely
controversial or toxic subject matter. This is the case with Marc Jacobson’s
execrable Pale Horse Rider, a backhanded hagiography of a violent,
physically abusive alcoholic, paranoid fool, and destroyer of American
democracy named Milton
“William” Cooper. Cooper was a pathological liar, unstable weirdo, and UFO
/ NWO freak, and the best and most accurate summary of him I can give is this:
literally – literally – every trick in Alex Jones’ book was stolen wholesale
from Bill Cooper. Jacobson’s book touches glancingly on all of these factors
while engaging in standard paranoid Boomer whining about JFK and tiresome postmodern
“quid est veritas?” sophistry.
Even so, I didn’t expect Jacobson to more or less accurately
describe the life of a monster and then conclude the text with (to paraphrase) “so
I guess I’m a fan now and it turns out Bill Cooper was a pretty cool dude.”
2) A Rage for Revenge by David Gerrold
Weird story! Before this year, I’d read exactly one book in
Gerrold’s “War Against the Chtorr” science fiction series. This was the fourth
(and, so far, last) volume, A Season for Slaughter. I read Slaughter
for the first and only time when I was, I don’t know, somewhere between age 11
and age 13. When I recently decided to re-read Gerrold as an adult, I spoke to
my parents and tried to figure out where the hell I might have acquired Gerrold’s
book, and none of us have any idea. It’s as though it just appeared on my shelf
one day like a sleeve of poisoned Oreos smuggled into a hated enemy’s pantry.
A Rage for Revenge is the third and (so far) worst
book in the tetralogy. Sure, the other volumes are chockablock with casual
racism and eye-blistering misogyny. Sure, they’re all very poorly written and rife
with thunderously unfunny jokes that you can tell Gerrold thought were absolutely
hilarious as he wrote them. They all contain abusive pedantry delivered
with the subtlety of a brick to the forehead, and they are all obviously
modeled (poorly) on noted fucknut Robert Heinlein’s already-objectionable Starship
Troopers. But only Rage for Revenge required an actual disclaimer
from the author at the beginning saying “no, really, I’m not trying to
brainwash you. No, stop laughing. Seriously, I’m not.”
This fixation on indoctrination is too bad, because if
Gerrold stuck to the Cthorran ecological invasion of Earth – what the series claims
to be about – he wouldn’t be on this list! His ideas on the potential variety
of alien life and even his meditations on consciousness are fairly compelling.
Those gems, however, lie buried deep at the bottom of a septic tank of weird,
half-Scientology half-Erhard Seminars
Training propaganda delivered in a Randian shriek. In fact, in the books
this cultish claptrap is often delivered literally at gunpoint,
which is not a bad metaphor for the experience of reading David Gerrold.
1 The King in Orange by John Michael “Archdruid” Greer
FUCK. THIS. BOOK.
I’m used to reading things I hate. Because I have a
masochistic tendency to deeply research and/or engage with ideas I think are
dangerous or disgusting, books that I detest vastly outnumber those I enjoy on
my average reading list. No doubt this is part of why I am such a jolly and
enjoyable fellow! Even so, King in Orange was the “mainstream” book I
hated more than any other I read this year. Perhaps in the last five
years, but let’s not be hasty.
John Michael Greer is a writer who focuses primarily on
Western Esotericism and the occult. He’s written several very decent books on
the topic, one or two of which I’ve read. He also self-identifies as a “Druid,”
which is dumb as fuck, and he ran a blog called The Archdruid Report, which
is even dumber (but hilarious – it sounds like the world’s worst investment
newsletter. “The runes say tech stocks will make a comeback!”). Trust
me, if I have a problem with Gerald Gardner fabricating an “ancient
connection” between his invention, Wicca, and a nonexistent centralized
European heathenry of the past, I have a much bigger problem with anyone
who claims to be a “Druid,” or even to understand what Druidism was or may have
been. It’s like claiming you practice the shamanic religion of Australopithecus
africanus; it’s meaningless. A claim like “Druidism” is nothing more than a
blank screen onto which you can project your beliefs while claiming an ancient
lineage that lends them authenticity. Not only that, in theory such pseudohistory
forces many people to think twice before stating the obvious: you’re just
making shit up. This is even the case
with antique “high magick” (I prefer “ceremonial” or “traditional” magick as nomenclatures
go). Much of Western Esotericism and occultism was manufactured wholesale
and then fraudulently attributed after the fact to some ancient source, usually appropriated
from Judaism. This was, mind you, while these same Westerners were doing
everything in their power to make life for Jews impossible and miserable. For
more about that, click here.
Let’s leave all of that aside. King in Orange
purports to be an exploration of (as the subtitle puts it) “the magical and
occult roots of political power.” Sorry, my druidic little friend, but that
book is actually called Politics
and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen and was
written by Gary Lachman, a much more talented and well-read researcher of the
subject than Greer. Gary was also the first bass player for Blondie! The title
of King in Orange comes from the fact that John Michael Greer is a Trump
supporter. He claims that his book examines the role magick (in particular,
chaos magick) played in right-wing netroots support for Trump in 2016. Sorry
again, friend, but that book is also by Gary Lachman, and is called Dark
Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump! In fact, I’ll touch
on Dark Star in my “Best 5 Books” post tomorrow!
Greer’s analysis of American politics is intentionally
obnoxious, glib, and facile. He starts from a promising enough premise: the
idea that class analysis is missing from most examinations of the Trump
phenomenon. Greer then demonstrates the most warped misunderstanding of class
analysis I’ve ever seen, totally disengaging from any attempt to justify the
accumulation of wealth by the top 1% (and top 1/10th of 1%) of people
in this country by setting up a mock class struggle between “the salaried class”
and “the wage class.” To hear Greer tell it, how much money you
have is not nearly as important as how you are paid. According to his
calculus, my boss – a person of color earning a salary that can’t possibly
average out to more than $25 an hour – is more “privileged” than a white physician’s
assistant clearing $40 an hour, but paid by the hour rather than salary. He
also makes the laugh-out-loud claim that the investment class has “seen rough
times lately” compared to the “salaried class.” I’m pretty sure that’s news to
the countless salaried workers laid off to support massive bonuses for
executives. He makes no attempt whatsoever to claim that Trump’s presidency
benefited this oh-so-precious “wage class” (of which I am a member, by the by).
The obvious explanation for this salad of mostly-sarcastic idiocy is that Greer
(not acquainted with economics or political science) reasoned backwards
from the conclusion that liberals constitute an economic class in and of
themselves, one in conflict with the economic class constituted by
conservatives in and of themselves. This
is complete horseshit.
John Michael Greer is at least half a fascist. He tells on
himself in subtle ways. He loves Julius Evola, and treats
the fascist intellectual’s writings as charming and cheeky rather than outright
calls to the rejection of society (AKA humanity) and an engagement in street
violence. He cribs liberally from Aleksandr Dugin’s Geopolitics and The
Fourth Political Ideology without crediting the Rasputin-looking
motherfucker at all. The only reason I know this is because (Lucifer help me) I’ve
read Dugin. I’ll give Greer this much: unlike any other modern fascist I’ve
read so far, I believe that Greer has actually ploughed through Oswald Spengler’s Decline
of the West. This is not an accomplishment one should sneer at, subject
matter notwithstanding. I’m only 1/3 of the way through Spengler’s vast,
pompous, shitty, subjective, and thoroughly factually inaccurate magnum dope-us
myself, and it is not an easy read. Then again, a lazy fascist is probably
preferable to a hardworking fascist.
All right, those are your top five bad books! Come back
tomorrow as I go into the five BEST books I read in 2021!
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