Klosterman - I Wear the Black Hat

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ALSO BY CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Fargo Rock City:

A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nrth Dakta

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:

A Low Culture Manifesto

Killing Yourself to Live:

85% of a True Story

Chuck Klosterman IV:

A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Downtown Owl:

A Novel

Eating the Dinosaur

The Visible Man:

A Novel

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Copyright 2013 by Chuck Klosterman

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First Scribner hardcover edition July 2013

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

JACKET DESIGN BY OFFICE OF PAUL SAHRE

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013003049

ISBN 978-1-4391-8449-3

ISBN 978-1-4391-8451-6 (ebook)

One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.

Klaus Kinski, super nihilist.

Im gonna quote a line from Yeats, I think it is: The best lack all conviction, while the best are filled... oh, no. Its the other way around. The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. Now, you figure out where I am.

Lou Reed, super high.

Im not a good guy. I mean, I dont hurt anybody. But I dont help, either.

Louis C.K., super real.

It seems like twenty-five lifetimes ago, but it was only twenty-five years: An older friend gave me a cassette hed duplicated from a different cassette (it was the era of tape dubbing, which was like file sharing for iguanodons). It was a copy of an album Id wanted, but the album was only thirty-eight minutes long; that meant there were still seven open minutes at the end of the cassettes A-side. In order to fill the gap, my friend included an extra song by Metallica. It was a cover of a song by the British band Diamond Head, a group I was completely unfamiliar with. The opening lines of the song deeply disturbed me, mostly because I misinterpreted their meaning (although I suspect the guys in Metallica did, too). The lyrics described bottomless vitriol toward the songwriters mother and a desire to burn her alive. The chorus was malicious and straightforward: Am I evil? Yes I am. Am I evil? I am man.

I cant remember precisely what I thought when I first heard those wordsI was a teenager, so it was probably something creative and contradictory, and Im relatively positive I imagined a nonexistent comma after the fourth am. But I do remember how I felt. I was confused and I was interested. And if I could have explained my mental state at fourteen with the clarity of language I have as a forty-year-old, I assume my reaction would have been the same complicated question I ask myself today: Why would anyone want to be evil?

I am typing this sentence on an autumn afternoon. The leaves are all dead, but still tethered to the trees, waiting for a colder future. Outside my living room window and three floors below, people are on the street. I vaguely recognize some of them, but not most of them. I rarely remember the names or faces of nonfictional people. Still, I believe these strangers are nonthreatening. I suppose you never know for certain what unfamiliar humans are like, but Im confident. They are more like me than they are different: predominantly white, in the vicinity of middle age, and dressed in a manner that suggests a different social class than the one they truly occupy (most appear poorer than they actually are, but a few skew in the opposite direction). Everyone looks superficially friendly, but none are irrefutably trustworthy. And as I watch these people from my window, I find myself wondering something:

Do I care about any of them?

I certainly dont dislike them, because I have no reason to do so. If one of these strangers were suddenly in trouble and I had the ability to help, I absolutely wouldbut I suspect my motive for doing so might not be related to them . I think it would be the result of all the social obligations Ive been ingrained to accept, or perhaps to protect my own self-identity, or maybe because Id feel like a coward if I didnt help a damaged person in public (or maybe because others might see me actively ignoring a person in need). I care about strangers when theyre abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when theyre literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was written poorly by me. The perspective is first person, but the hero doesnt do much. He doesnt do anything. He just looks out the window.

This realization makes me feel shame... yet not so ashamed that I suddenly (and authentically) care about random people on the street. I feel worse about myself, but I feel no differently about them. And this prompts me to consider several questions at once:

1) Am I a psychopath?

2) Is my definition of the word care different from the definition held by other people? Is it possible that I do care, but that I define caring as an all-encompassing, unrealistic aspiration (so much so that it makes it impossible for me to recognize my own empathy)?

3) Does my awareness of this emotional gap actually mean I care more than other people? Or is that comical self-deception?

4) What if these strangers are bad people? Would that eliminate my emotional responsibility? Nobody needs to feel bad about not caring about Adolf Hitler. Right? Right. Well, what if some of these anonymous strangersif given the means and opportunitymight behave exactly like Hitler? Or worse than Hitler? What if one of these people would become the Super Hitler, if granted unlimited power? Do I have to care about them until they prove otherwise? Do I have to care about them as humans until they invade Poland? And in order to be truly good, do I still need to keep caring about them even after theyve done so?

5) Why do I always suspect everyone is lying about how they feel?

6) Why do I think I can understand the world by staring out the window?

7) Lets assume half the people on my street are categorically good and half are categorically bad. I cant tell who is who, but (somehow) I know that this is irrefutably the case. Lets also operate from the position that humans somehow have agency over those two classifications. Lets assume there is no Higher Power and no afterlife, and that all of these self-aware peopleregardless of their social history or familial upbringingare able to decide if they want to be good or bad. Lets assume its every humans unambiguous choice, based on all the information available. If this is true, then the import of the word good and the import of the word bad are nothing more than constructions. They are classifications we created subjectively; their meanings dont derive from any larger reality or any deeper truth. Theyre just the two definitions we have agreed upon, based on various books and myths and parables and philosophies and artworks and whatever feels like the innate difference between rightness and wrongness. In other words, there are good people and there are bad people, but those two designations are unreal. The designations exist in conversation, but theyre utterly made-up. Within this scenario, would goodness still be something to aspire to? Wouldnt this mean that good people are simply the ones who accept that what theyve been told is arbitrarily true? That theyve accepted a policy they didnt create for themselves?