Confessions of an Ex Nazi Skinhead: An American parable?

When I finally set Nathan Singer's newest joint in the light of you down, I was confused. What had started out as the story of alienation of an American teenager in the 1990's morphed into a kind West Side Story, only with hip hop and oi as its soundtrack. Then, something completely different emerges from the intertext, nebulae of association and symbols from which we draw our understanding of everything.

Singer, who, unlike many of his contemporaries, does not hide behind the kind of cold ironic pose that has characterized the last thirty years or so of American Letters; Singer is a writer with heart, invested in his characters to such a degree that it implodes the certainty of authorial detachment. It is in the virtuosity of his prose that you find Singer, living each and every character as though it is him, and so, each of his characters walk and talk and feel with a vividness that renders them tactile in every way-almost too real and intense and confrontational to be merely in dead print. They live…

…and act in Singer's conception of a Theater of Cruelty, Artaud's soul lacerating ground zero for the bounds of "text", in which the fiction and the fact become one in the same, and through the brutality of revealed truth, do we ultimately find salvation and redemption, a la Oedipus Rex. The question which has been in my mind since reading his first joint A Prayer For Dawn is to what degree Singer's Cruel Theater is for us, and how much is reserved for Singer? Who's catharsis is this? Is there a catharsis? What is it?

The Cruel Theater of Singer is howling again, but in a disturbingly conventional form. If Chasing The Wolf was all Legbah trickster time travel and uncertain agency, the story of Mikal Fanon, our young and pissed off white boy, confronting the crumbling dream and its crippled working class avatars, is reaching back to an older tradition, Bildungsroman. This bildungsroman, however, not moral in the religious sense, like, say The Confessions of St. Augustine, but moral in the political sense, starting with Fanon's awareness of race and its tensions in his working class neighborhood, already blighted by the time he hit puberty by the wholesale exodus of manufacturing jobs that has turned much of this country above the Ohio river into the Rust Belt. In short, Fanon, a white kid caught, a slave to any number of socioeconomic forces in the street and in his own alcoholic home, is the frequent pray of neighborhood bullies, and, as victims do, he festers a great hatred towards the world. One of his tormentors, Jack Curry, a white guy himself, is able to negotiate the racial complexities, despite being the ostensible antithesis of his black neighbors: a pasty metalhead. Curry's tormenting of Fanon is constant, but not always physical, or even confrontational in the traditional sense. His ease with his integrated surroundings only underscore Fanons ill-ease, and so, Curry remains a ghost that haunts Fanon, present, in some cases, in his absence.

Fanon, like all alienated youth, search for purpose and belonging, desperately trying to fill the void, and his salvation comes in the form of Richard Lovecraft, the intellectual leader of a group of White Supremacist skinheads who intervene on the behalf of Fanon. Fanon, ever the hateful victim, soon falls in with the skins, and finds himself a soldier in RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), the central tenet of the White Supremacist Movement, immersed in the Hitler inspired Oi bands, stomping homosexuals, and other fun things like this. Fanon finds his purpose in hatred, violence, punk style nihilism and, occasionally, National Socialist ideology.

For Fanon, his devotion has little to do with the ideology, but rather man himself. Lovecraft, one imagines, is a bit like the charismatic prophet of RaHoWa Derek Vinyard, played to chilling effect by Edward Norton, in Tony Kaye's celluloid morality play American History X. Like the most of the young and disillusioned in the film, who are seemingly skinheads only to belong to something, one gets the sense that Fanon might have become a Hari Krishna if Lovecraft, the one person who seemed to give a damn, the one person who he belonged with, decided to become one. A cult of personality such as Lovecraft tend to draw the lost like bats to a streetlight.

Sure, Fanon undergoes the appropriate physical transformation, shaved head, bomber jacket, boots and, of course, swastika tattoo, but it is all ostensible, designed for Lovecraft's approval. He can't even make it through Mein Kampf.

Lovecraft himself is no card board cut out, and certainly no Vinyard clone: Though Lovecraft is definitely a true believer, he owns Bad Brains records (Bad Brains are an all black Rasta inspired Hardcore band, and perhaps, the inventors of the style that came to be most closely indentified with Black Flag). He speaks enthusiastically about Hitler's "ecological iniatives". Unlike his knucklehead sycophants, who are all "burn it down and start again", he is politically aware in the conventional sense as well in as in the reactionary sense. He pays attention to the American political scene, and notes the country's swing to the right, which he surmises may be the catalyst in coming race war. "Old Glory is the New Swastika" Lovecraft proclaims.

Mikal notes this, particularly, in a movement of anti government sentiments (it is revolutionary, so they say), Lovecraft's "devotion to the Republican Party…'You alienate yourselves from the new rising power at your own peril…'Lovecraft tells his gang.

It is at this moment the novel finds its apotheosis from the bildungsroman of Mikal Fanon from confused knucklehead to committed eco activist, from Fascist to Leftist (the completion of his political moral journey) and all that entails to something else entirely. It was, while witnessing Singer's cruel play, that, perhaps our protagonist is the focal point, he exists almost as distraction from the real intent here: The bildungsroman of America, from the age of 218 years to the present, or, rather this country's political moral journey.

Re-enter Lovecraft's absolute opposite, and Fanon tormentor, Jack Curry, committed Leftist agitator, he of ropey dreadlocks, black clothing, and abstract body art. His revolution is in opposition to everything Lovecraft works for: Racial Equality, Economic Justice, Human Rights, yet, because of the unflinching devotion to his particular ideology, he is more like Lovecraft than he would ever admit. Curry embodies opposition to Lovecraft, and, even before their ultimate showdown, they exist as the trace of the other, particularly in the mind of Fanon, and exist as such forever after, even after a bloody showdown which is the transformation of all concerned.

Singer's theater, in this regard, is arch, because he inhabits the characters so fully, that one would be tempted to overlook the ideological concerns, because there is not a character he who exists as a kind of Sartrian philosophic platitude, but as real beings inhabiting the ideological minefield that became the nineties, and continues today. These aren't cutouts, so who, as readers are we to identify with? Fanon? Lovecraft? Curry?

The political/moral journey of this country is incomplete, and, from history, we know, as Singer is all too aware, the ideological extremes end in oppression and murder, evidenced in micro by the bloody showdown between the skins and the Curry's crew, the Right and the Left, in pitched battle in the front lawn of the republic. In this light, Fanon is perhaps the United States, a petulant, sometimes violent teenager among the nations of the world, who will find inner peace with age, if it doesn't self destruct and take the rest of the world with it. Singer, cruel as ever, provides no answers, only questions.

We meet back up with Mikal Fanon, years later, a fairly conventional lefty green activist who goes back to his old neighborhood and finds his former tormentors. It is the sight of Jack Curry, who was once so powerful as to inspire murderous hatred, as broken down cripple, faded tattoos and all, that perhaps is the most telling. All the hardcoreness, the almost Stalinist devotion to an ideology, is gone, and Fanon feels no rancor, nor do his tormentors, who speak of it almost wistfully, as a young thing. Everybody mellowed out, and had a drink.

I can't help but wonder that, as we close on the an Administration as ideological and imperial as this one has been, where we have become the aggressors, where even the right to due process has vanished and we torture, a Republican administration that would seem to be the fulfillment of Lovecraft's "Old Glory" conception of the rising Right, if, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, we are to find inspiration in this journey, and like Augustine, have faith, and take comfort in the fact that all things pass, and we, as a people, may too grow up. Perhaps Singer, ever the trickster, has written us a hope letter, and is telling us to just hang in there. He'll be gone soon enough.