BAD CITIZEN
Jeffrey St. Clair >
+ Cole Allen seemed like a regular guy. Cole Allen is a sturdy American name, right out of a Louie L’Amore novel. But in America, even regular guys snap.
In the Republic of the Gun, almost all of the regular guys have one or two. When they snap, they tend to grab one.
Cole Allen grabbed two. He also grabbed some knives. Then he took a train, rode the iron rails through the long night into the American outback, nursing his grievances across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, over the Rockies and the Great Plains. He looked out on the lights of houses, towns and cities, filled with other regular guys late on their car payments, stuck in dead-end jobs sucking up to dead-end bosses, worried about their kids’ rotten teeth and no dental coverage, going thick in the waist, watching their teams lose night after night. Regular guys with gripes and grudges and real intractable problems eating away at their souls.
Men like him sitting alone in a room at night, or worse in a room full of people and feeling alone, caught in the tense grip of some affliction, with no one to talk to about it, because regular guys don’t do that. They get talked at instead: hectored, belittled, talked down. Regular guys, normal guys, posting rants on some dark corner of the Net, bathed in the cool blue light of the screen, about how the software they once programmed, now programs them, making their jobs, if not their very self, expendable.. Guys who feel afflicted by the world around them and their only security is found in the reassuring grip of that most American of objects, a gun.
They want to settle scores. But how and with whom?
Cole Allen had been sold too many promises that didn’t pan out. The promise of hope and change. The promise of restoring the “soul of America,” whatever that really means. The promises of tech, trickledown, and wokeness. The promise of nostalgia restored, a reified America from the land of hope and dreams. But it’s the little annoyances that can loom large: the rising insurance payments, crappy cell service and internet too slow to stream, the damn heat, the traffic that doesn’t move, the commercialization of everything, even church, the bad TV, and the worse movies, music that grates and irritates, rather than consoles and inspires.
Cole Allen rode the rails twenty-seven hundred miles to do what, exactly? Did he even know? Does he know now? Did he feel betrayed by both political parties, exasperated by years of empty rhetoric, worn down by a ravenous economic system that works only for the super-rich and pits average guy against average guy? Or was he just bored with it all, that deadliest of American sins?
Did he want to shoot or get shot? Was he acting on nihilistic impulse, an American Raskolnikov lashing out against the cultural nothingness leaching the life from him, even if, like most regular American guys, he’d never heard of Rodion Raskolnikov?
And that’s fine. That’s as it should be. Reading Dostoevsky is not good for the mind of the regular guy. His cold, dark stories of normal people driven mad can release to the surface all kinds of buried anxieties and neuroses he didn’t know he had and he had enough anxieties already. He had so many they’ve brought him here on this night train, bound for glory or infamy. Either will do.
Or did he see himself as an avenger? If so, what was he avenging? What was he going to save? Something tangible or abstract? On whose behalf?
Do we really want to know these things? Do we want answers? Or will the answers, if there are any, strike too close to the bone? Have the myths of the country begun to eat itself, to cannibalize the collective psyche of the nation, like the furies in “The Bacchae” of Euripides?
In a country with 500 million guns, everyone has the chance to be an avenging angel, to enter the spotlight and create a spectacle, disrupt the programmed flow of time, if only for a few seconds, and be forever memorialized on security cameras, running down a hallway with a shotgun toward some kind of blazing destiny, you write for yourself, just like those archetypal American guys, Butch and Sundance.
In 1988, George Will attacked novelist Don DeLillo for humanizing Lee Harvey Oswald in his novel Libra and blaming “America” for shaping Oswald’s character. The pious Will denounced DeLillo as “a bad citizen.” DeLillo, who rarely says anything publicly, took Will’s attempted slander as a badge of honor, saying: ”I don’t take it seriously, but being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.”
Am I “humanizing” Cole Allen? He is human, isn’t he? And, for the country that reared him’s sake, he had better be understood that way.
COUNTERPUNCH






























