is waif
THE KIDS ARE ALT RIGHT
It’s 2018 and it’s December. I live in New York City and I’ll be the first to say: it’s a fucking shit show. The hustle and the bustle have arrived but in a more scramble through the bramble kind of way; the end of the calendar year has caught up with all of us, as if we didn’t know that after October and November would come December and then January. My job takes me on seemingly endless errands to 5th Avenue between 42nd and 59th Street. If you’re an out-of-towner, like 90% of everyone in New York, this is the Christmas hub: Rockefeller Center, Radio City, an assortment of decorated store windows, the incredibly beefed-up police presence - it’s all happening, now and in a major way.
As I write this, thousands of Santas are roaming the streets for a yearly celebration known only as SantaCon. My boyfriend texts me: “If I had known SantaCon was today, I never would have left my house. Don’t they know they’re all white supremacists?” I feel his pain. The Santas - though admittedly not all white supremacists - stumble from bar to bar throughout Manhattan, getting plastered over the course of about 12 hours, and are famously loud, brash, and most importantly young.
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I would imagine 90% of these Santas are under 29 years of age and are composed of what internet trolls refer to as the domcult (short for ‘dominant culture’). Each year on this day, the city feels extra volatile. Around every corner waits a new team of tall men, uniformed in red and white, shouting about nothing at all in an effort to entertain their cronies. It feels like high school gym class.
In 1980, director Bob Clark released a movie about the Christmas season in small town Indiana that tells the story of a young boy whose sole Christmas wish is to be gifted a sleek red BB gun. He knows the dangers of asking for such a gift from his family, so he carefully crafts a campaign to make his wishes known without coming across as too eager. I’m not sure if my upbringing in small town Indiana begets the literally constant play and replay of this movie on basic cable, but this movie is played on continuous repeat 24 hours a day for at least all of Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day. And I get it, I’ve seen the movie, it’s funny, and especially nostalgic for people of older generations.
Moreover, it’s grown to be iconic: the Leg Lamp, the F Word, the Pink Bunny Costume, and, of course, the official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle. Not to spoil it for you, but the boy - who all through Christmas morning thinks the adults’ conspiracy that he’ll shoot his eye out has persuaded Santa Claus to think the same - receives the gun as a surprise last minute gift from his father.
Walking to the train, I see a girl Santa engaged in a screaming match with a boy Santa, and, enhanced with alcohol, the fight is scary. On the train, there are seven or so Santas, laughing and shouting and playing music through their phone speakers. The train is pretty full, but the Santas are undeniably in charge. One guy smells something bad and says, “Ok who shit themselves?” to which a girl he’s with says, “Who raised you? George Lopez?” And they all laugh loudly. The whole ride is about them.
There’s something about these figures - young, loud, brash - that feels like danger. It feels like the adoption and misconstruing or repurposing of quotidian symbols often associated with fascism and popularized today by the Alt Right.
My mind jumps to the Alt Right meme of chugging glasses of milk as a display of white supremacy - the idea being that there’s something in the genes of white people specifically that allows lactose to be digested while the genome that aides this process is missing in people of color, particularly from Black people. Geneticists have come forward to denounce this as a misrepresentation of their studies, but the efforts are hardly effective. After all, the Alt Right is a decidedly young group of fascists, and geneticists are only a different kind of authority to resist.
The leap from SantaCon to White Supremacy seems impossibly small. After all, what does Santa do to wash down the thousands of Christmas cookies he eats on Christmas Eve? Slams back a glass of milk at every house across the world.
Now this is not to say, of course, that Santa is a white supremacist. I’m not crazy. To use this article to call Santa a white supremacist would be insane and unproductive. But this equivocation seems important, simply as demonstration for the ease and subtlety with which innocuous symbols can be repurposed.
The holiday season has been a highly charged political event for upwards of 50 years since some guy wrote a pamphlet - yes, a pamphlet - claiming that The Jews were trying to take Christ out of Christmas when people (read: businesses) want to display a menorah during Hanukkah, or greet people by saying “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas,” or change the color of coffee cups from white to red: the War on Christmas.
I think a lot about A Christmas Story, maybe because of where I grew up (Central Indiana) and where the movie takes place (Northern Indiana), or maybe just because of the iconography (I love icons). But the pastiche of Ralphie’s wintertime as a young boy makes me remember what it was like to be young and just want someone to hear what I was saying. I didn’t want to go to Boy Scouts anymore; I wanted to take dance lessons. I didn’t want to play with toys, I wanted tools to help me achieve my goals. I wanted to be famous, but first, that meant I had to be seen.
One of the foreman of modern Fascism is some guy known online as Mike Enoch. He sounds a lot like me: went to school in New York, moved to Bushwick in Brooklyn, and started dating a blonde woman from a Jewish family. He got a job in Manhattan but assured his friends and family that he wouldn’t stop swimming upstream just because he worked with the masses. My boyfriend is not a blonde woman, but does come from a Jewish background. Where Mike Enoch and I differ is that he got sick from an unprescribed medication and quickly fell into the depths of Reddit and other hot-button sites for (often radical) political debate. The power of the internet is anonymity and that it's so vast that no one really can keep track of who’s doing or saying what. The New Yorker’s profile on this guy likens his online activity to, “[just] another video game,” complete with the same sort of social interactions afforded by ever-popular live gaming experiences. As his social consciousness in the real world deteriorated, his reputation online blossomed. He started a blog called Right Stuff so he could share and discuss his radical political ideas with a community of like-minded individuals and give himself a voice he couldn’t have in New York City.
Mike Enoch fell victim to an internet phenomenon called ‘doxing’ where an online figure is outed by other internet users as being the human person they are by releasing personal information in a public manner. To me, this sounds terrifying and electrifying. On the one hand, to be exposed as someone responsible for his own troubling thoughts and opinions is terrifying. But from another angle, Enoch can finally live his truth. He can’t dissociate from this online celebrity he has created for himself; he can, at last, rise up to meet it. It’s what he’s wanted all along, and quite frankly, what the rest of us want from these types of people too.
The cult of Celebrity is tangible in this cultural moment. We love famous people, especially if we don’t know where they came from or what they’re doing. The access we have to original content created by billions of stranger peers is immeasurable. But increased access means it’s harder to grab someone’s attention, so we have to create the attention ourselves. The New Yorker didn’t make Mike Enoch or the Alt Right famous. Enoch created his celebrity for himself by taking a controversial stance on a variety of topics until he had created an ideology. It’s genius, regardless of the fact that it’s detrimental to thousands of people. But this type of celebrity is nothing new. We see it in America nearly every day and we are addicted.
Children of the 90’s know the names of the Columbine shooters. The guy who shot up the Aurora, CO screening of The Dark Knight is nearly an internet meme because of how he looks. The guy who tried to assassinate Nixon was trying to impress Jodie Foster. John Wilkes Booth shouted in Latin and jumped from the box seat Lincoln was sitting in while he was fleeing the scene. Dangerous people are those of us who live humdrum lives and want to be known around the world at any cost.
We pretend we have the power to decide who is famous and who is not, but as we see in countless rags-to-riches stories throughout time, we don’t. Parents of Alt Right figures and school shooters always wonder, often publicly: what went wrong? And there are always a myriad of speculations about how Marilyn Manson made them do it, or they played too many violent video games. And though studies do show that violent video games have the same psychological effect as actually hurting someone, it seems like yet another scapegoat.
Could it be that the impetus to hurt people is as simple as the desire to misbehave? That the more we warn against danger, the more the danger becomes desirable? I think back to Ralphie and his official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle. The more people that tell him he’ll shoot his eye out, the greater his desire grows. At the climax of the film, when Ralphie receives the gun from his father, we feel that youthful sense of pride and accomplishment in his subtle and gradual deception of every adult figure in his life. Why don’t I feel fear?
I could have been any of these boys. I went to summer camp as a Boy Scout and learned to shoot a BB gun. I listened to Marilyn Manson and went to more alt rock radio festival concerts than I can count. Am I counting down the days till when my past catches up with me and the only way to rectify these events is to hurt a lot of people all at once? The only difference I can determine is that I’m a gay white man, but the LGBTQ+ community is often a target for this kind of violence. It seems that, however many times we may ask what went wrong and what we could have done differently, the answer is simply: we don’t know.
As I grow further into my twenties and the age gap between me and the proverbial kids grows greater each day, I have started to assess my own influence as a role model, especially as it directly opposes my aspiration to appeal to a certain level of youth. And as I daydream about my own future and whether I, myself, will be a parent, I wonder about how much I will be willing to sacrifice my own dignity in order to appeal to a new generation, and how much the choices I make about the gifts I give will influence my child’s behavior. After years of watching the acts of quote-unquote troubled children be attributed to the music they listen to and the activities they use to fill their free time, I must say: I only want to take care of the younger generations. For these reasons, I recommend the following gifts in lieu of a Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle:
1. Socks: You’re going to need them no matter how much you may hate to receive them
2. Underwear: The sexiest and/or least cool gift to receive ever
3. Scratch Off Lotto Tickets: A cheap way to remind your kids that the only way to make money is to work hard and earn an honest living
4. A Bible: A piece of media no one in the 21st century will consume, regardless of their spirituality
5. A Bright Pink Bunny Rabbit Costume: Maybe Aunt Clara had it right all along.