Volume 9, Number 6
Pleased to be included, I wish - for
my sake and for that of my unidenti-
fied admirers - that A Reader's Guide to
Twentieth-Century Writers were a
stronger book. -Richard Kostelanetz
Learning to Gawk - Adam
Parfrey is the kind of journalist who
wouldn't just cover a serial killer -
he'd hire the murderer as his crime cor-
respondent. As an author and as a pub-
lisher, Parfrey takes the voyeurism
beneath the surface of mainstream jour-
nalism, magnifies it, and thrusts it into
the reader's face. So you're interested
in cultists, criminals, and crazies, he
says. So you're curious about the
fringe. Well, here it is. Take a good look
at it. Don't turn away! Are you satisfied?
His most recent book, Cult Rapture
(Feral House, 1995, 371 pp., $14.95),
covers everything from the mail-order
bride business (which "confirmed femi-
nist tracts pillorying the male's dehu-
manizing regard of the female as
commodi ty") to James Shelby
Downard, the undisputed king of the
conspiracy theorists. There are also sev-
eral chapters on the militia movement,
with which Parfrey betrays some sym-
pathies. Then there's I CAN ("a cult of
sex-obsessed cripples"), a rather cruel
attack on Andrea Dworkin (whose the-
ories he initially equates with the femi-
nist mainstream, "a lazy, misogynist
assumption for which I apologize"),
and a report on a fan club devoted to
one of Elvis Presley's girlfriends. This
last item is prefaced by another apol-
ogy: "The following article, which orig-
inally appeared in the San Diego Reader,
ostensibly contains insights on the soci-
ological bizarrarie of fandom. A little
hindsight has filled me with shame
over the article's laconic sadism. Little
did I realize that the vicarious pleas-
ures of fandom exist so that its
practitioners can face impossibly bleak
lives. . . . Although I fully admit my
culpability in the following article's
sneering condescension, I offer it here
uncut as an object lesson to unfeeling
sadists. Those who laugh with the arti-
cle, who share in my joy at clubbing
easy targets, should consider them-
selves implicated in the crime ... joy at
other people's expense is the necessary
first step in dehumanizing the 'other,'
the psychological precondition for
genocide."
So why read about this kind of
thing at all? Parfrey's answer comes at
the conclusion to my favorite chapter,
"The Endangered Freak": "We must re-
learn to gawk without shame, to admit
our fascination with deformity, the bio-
logic expression of the fin-de-siecle. If
we aren't allowed to know the 'other,'
we sure as hell will never understand
ourselves." -Jesse Walker
Libertarian Chrestomathy -
"Libertarianism" originally meant a
belief in free will, with no political
implications at all. The construction
"civil libertarian" seems to date from
the latter half of the nineteenth century;
the word "libertarian," alone and
naked, was taken over by the anarchists
as a euphemism a little later. (The anar-
chists needed a new label, as the bomb-
throwers and assassins in their midst
had sullied the name even beyond its
original meaning, "a supporter of social
or political chaos" - which was pejora-
tive enough.)
If Charles Sprading's Liberty and
the Great Libertarians, published in
1913, is any indication, the word was
also used as an attempt to cast the net
outside the small world of die-hard
anarchists. Sprading's book includes
aphorisms ("Laconics of Liberty") and
essays from a great diversity of individ-
uals. The anti-slavery, anti-Constitution
constitutional lawyer Lysander
Spooner is preceded in these pages by
the American president Abraham
Lincoln; the single-tax theoretician
Henry George is followed by the
Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy, the
individualist-anarchist Benjamin
Tucker, and the communist-anarchist
Prince Peter Kropotkin. Oscar Wilde
and George Bernard Shaw snuggle
between the covers with
Robert Ingersoll, John
Stuart Mill, Emma
Goldman, and Edmund
Burke. Max Stirner is
excerpted, as are Herbert
Spencer, Thomas Paine,
Auberon Herbert, and ...
Mr. Dooley!
The charm of this vol-
ume is the juxtaposition
of the American individ-
ualist anarchists Gosiah "We shouldn't have left it running over the weekend -
Warren, Stephen Pearl it came up with a doctrine of free will."
July 1996
Andrews, Tucker, Spooner, et al.) with
those outside the tradition. Sprading's
idea was an interesting one, but he
doesn't really convince. Everybody
knows just how different these people
were.
The biggest problem, for me at least,
is all the nutball economics (the selec-
tions from William B. Greene are espe-
cially embarrassing). Most of these
writers fell prey to money-crankism,
odd land-reform schemes, and idiotic
anti-capitalist blather. In the few pages
of his introduction to the new edition
(Fox & Wilkes, 1995, xiv + 362 pp.,
$24.95 hc, $14.95 sc), Carl Watner tries
to set this into some perspective. But he
needs more space, and a lot more will-
ingness to criticize the American
individualists.
But for all their errors, these think-
ers also have their charms. Theodore
Hertzka, an Austrian economist
(though not of the"Austrian school"),
makes sense occasionally, even as he
advocates ideas I find dubious (he
opposes land ownership). Any radical
who demolishes the labor theory of
value can't be all bad.
It is apparent that the term "libertar-
ian" has evolved since Sprading's time.
Mencken used it on occasion, and
Mencken was more a Sumnerian Social
Darwinist than anything else. About
mid-century, the Georgist radicals
Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov,
along with thinkers and promoters
such as Leonard Read and Robert
LeFevre, began using the term to
defend their pro-capitalist, anti-socialist
philosophies. This usage was solidified
as admirers of Ayn Rand's thought
(and refugees from it) also adopted the
term to describe their thinking.
Anarchists of the old-fashioned,
Liberty 65