Jim Goad’s Misanthropology

Jim Goad is the ghoul of the 1990s. In a decade that exalted renegade attitudes with a style of detached, cynical cool, Goad found every way to take that spirit up to and over the precipice of good sense. He defended unrestricted gun ownership in his zine ANSWER Me!, and was implicated as the inspiration for a White House shooting and a suicide. He dedicated its fourth and final issue to celebrating rape, and was put on trial for obscenity. As an author of a major publisher he embraced the tenets of right-wing populism to sneer at liberal hypocrisy, and helped bring it to the political mainstream. These unconscionable cultural crimes earned him notoriety, and the marginal status suitable to it, for the rest of his life. And I haven’t even gotten to his actual crimes.

The dream of the ‘90s is dead, and as of last month so is Jim Goad. But it’s fair to say that he outlived it for a good many years as one of its rare exemplars. Goad seemed to take seriously the idea that the 1960s should have a spirited and antagonistic response. Its worst consequences should be confronted in the strongest possible language and never evading the ugliest possible thoughts. “ANSWER Me!’s journalism operates from a deep-rooted mistrust of human nature,” Goad wrote in the introduction to the first issue in 1991.

We call it “misanthropology.” We don’t belong to any sociopolitical clubs. We’re not conservative or liberal. Members of the “counterculture” usually don’t think any more originally than the powermongers and working classes they disdain. In their own way, they’re every bit as dogmatic and intolerant, maybe more so. Liberals would probably blanch at the notion that they’re fascists, but they seem to spend most of their time trying to suppress the things they don’t like. They also share this in common with conservatives—they’d probably like to shut us up.

Coming in the immediate wake of Bill Hicks’s Dangerous and Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, and in the midst of alternative culture’s rise, this intellectual populism was not new. And many aspects of his and his then-wife Debbie’s zine have an air of the dated. Interviews with Anton LaVey and members of NAMBLA. Articles on the films of Ray Dennis Steckler and Mexican comic books about people with deformities. Rants with titles like “The Homeless Can Eat Shit” and “Babies are Dirty.” Massive, encyclopedic feature packages on suicides and serial killers.

By the time I discovered the zine some 20 years ago, much of the content was fairly rote. Helped in large part by Vice, whose editors cited ANSWER Me! as an influence and gave Goad assignments. They cast the zine’s rough edges in a more market-friendly elegance that, by simple juxtaposition, also made them grimier, but only just. Vice still lacked crucial elements that gave the original its distinction, and which came upon me in a very rude intrusion. I had already taken up the idea of doing my own print publication on the inspiration of Dave Eggers’s more idealistic but scrappy glossy Might. ANSWER Me! clearly came from a much darker corner of the alternative underground, though it seemed to go beyond the cheap thrills of the Jim Rose Circus or the absurdity of “Detachable Penis.” It was also doing much more with fewer resources, a very useful thing to come upon when you are in the same situation, but also an intimidating one.

ANSWER Me! impressed upon me first by its quality. To call it a “zine” is almost a technicality. Though it had a strident DIY ethic, taking no advertising and spurning the niceties of having to build a core market-based readership, it was not the folkish Xerox affair that typifies the medium. Each issue was an exhaustive undertaking. Professionally designed and graphic-heavy, subject to perfectionist editing (many claim to have never found a typo and neither have I), and extensively researched. We might scoff at the listicles of 100 serial killers in issue two or 100 suicides in issue three, considering everyone does that today from their laptop, or podcasts about them freely. But the necessary time for and commitment to assembling them in the 1990s is unthinkable. This is owing to Jim’s and Debbie’s backgrounds as dissatisfied freelance writers. The first issue is comprised of failed pitches, a later issue includes a filing draft of a feature Goad wrote for Playboy on Vietnamese gangs. “If I couldn’t write I’d probably kill—myself or (preferably) someone else.”

Second, then, was Goad’s dogged sense of mission. ANSWER Me! was one of a handful of zines from the period that were not satisfied to serve a scene or to entertain with mere shock and sarcasm. Rather they wanted to violate their reader’s presumed innocence about the world. Beneath his posturing he was just a worthless ill-mannered child with some modicum of adult drudgery. It was the task of zines like Pure, Fuck, Boiled Angel, Rollerderby, Murder Can Be Fun, and Gun Fag Manifesto not to divert or cleverly inform him, but to drag him further into the morass of modern American life, awash in the betrayals and disappointments of earlier generations and his misguided sense of cerebral capacity. And like ANSWER Me! a handful of them faced legal backlash, Pure most seriously. Goad balanced his professional experience with a zeal for repulsion. At its best, Goad’s prose can reach a charging, nervous lucidity. He seemed to aspire to a trailer park Tom Wolfe. But he often exceeded that with a fusion of Westbrook Pegler’s pugilism, Jim Thompson’s menace, and Eric Bogosian’s bombast. At times you sense Chuck Palahniuk nodding along with a grin.

… Your life is a tape in rewind, and I erase all the good parts. Now I tell your story, ghostwrite your autobiography. I’ve stolen you. You look for the peace, the calm continuity, but I’ve stolen you.

Your cells are soaked in my bitterness. Your bones will always remember the pain I’ve inflicted. I crouch deep inside your spine, down at the base. Slowly, quietly, you’ll start to think of me. You won’t be able to stop it, as much as you grind your jaws and punch at the walls to be rid of me. It makes you insane to realize that I own you. I’ve put your mind in a sling, rubbed a little black smudge on your soul.

“I expected people to dislike ANSWER Me!,” Goad wrote later, “but it never occurred to me that anyone would think I’m only kidding.” Amid the mass-narcotizing effects of Gen X irony, nothing incensed Goad more than accusations of put-on. “I draw a stick figure of one critic. In childish handwriting I scrawl, ‘Little Mikey McP. was a jealous boy—jealous boys get MURDERED.’ I slice my leg open with a razor blade and wipe my blood … all over the page. I send him the letter via Certified Mail. He calls me up, voice quavering, saying he’s sorry.” And the scoffing of outside observers probably did as much to push Goad as any moral sense. He equated the “Rape” issue to “throwing battery acid” at his fans, one seemingly self-destructive act of contempt.

Not everything he did was in that spirit. That’s just the spirit that worked. His attempts to keep things light often devolved into a Bugs Bunny-style smirk. Especially when he was contractually obligated to reach a mass audience as he was with The Redneck Manifesto, a book that found a modest cult among a vocal portion of the present right-wing, but one that also does not add to what paleosomething thinkers like Murray Rothbard said in their attempts to fuse libertarians with blue-collar social conservatives. Not that Goad’s contributions to the New Right are overblown; they are contributions of style rather than dogma. He was more prone to using militias as a rhetorical cudgel as opposed to taking them on their merits. But present political discourse leaves that style, if not fully realized, at least momentarily set aside. It bares little resemblance to Gavin McInnes’s court-foolishness through Vice and the Proud Boys or the memeplexed conspiratorialism of the online forums that converged onto Capitol Hill. Even Stephen Miller’s hardline immigration policies are sentimental at their core in a way Goad’s writing never aspired to be. He’s doing all this for you.

Goad himself kept a low profile at the peak of the Trump era; keeping his own online niche but otherwise content, by all appearances, in his influence and immune from the hazards of influencing. Nevertheless, Matthew Schmitz finds that influence “troubling” for valid enough reasons. For this, we return to the decade that brought us here.

The betrayal of the ‘90s was not that everyone sold out and that the revolution, underwritten by an institutionalized pre-digital culture industry at the peak of its relevance, was a massive fraud. (To be sure, they did sell out and it was a fraud, in addition to being a psychical curse on all subsequent generations.) Rather it was in the plausible deniability it gave for the motives of the era’s countercultural icons. There was no rebellion against the transcendental seeking of the ‘60s. There was, in fact, a profound yearning for it deep below the cynicism. Bill Hicks yearned for transcendence. Burning Man pivoted to it from gun-toting, pyromaniacal anarchy. Everyone wanted to save the world. Everyone checked their horoscopes. More than yearning for transcendence, ‘90s culture felt, for reasons I cannot fathom, that it did more to earn it. In having a distaste for transcendence, Jim Goad transcended the ‘90s and, despite being very much not alive, walks freely among us.

Goad’s appeal lies less in what he specifically thought about gender issues or the plight of the working class than in his raw materialistic worldview. Unburdened of nostalgia or sentiment, there is only the here and now. The here and now is relentlessly hostile and deserves only greater hostility in return. It is the stance of every great cynic in literature from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Bierce. It is also the stance of certain Discord servers. Goad’s idiom lies somewhere in between the Satanic majesty of the former and the antisocial impulses of the latter. It’s a very uneasy position, as it remains close to us, and can become closer the more decentralized and isolated our society becomes, the more cut off from communal manners its inhabitants are, and the less our culture has to lose as a result.