By Jay Fox
Brooklyn, NY, USA
The people must fight for
the law as for city walls – Heraclitus
This is the fiftieth bar article that I've written for Stay
Thirsty Magazine. Like most
milestones, it came up a lot sooner than I thought it would, and it still seems
as though I've only scratched the surface of what it's like to spend your
nights drinking your way through New York City. Looking back at a career my
liver certainly most certainly laments, I realize that I've at least drawn a
fairly good sketch of what the city's bars are like and perhaps even how this
city has changed in the past eight years. For the amount of poison I've rented
from these places, it's a good start.
However, one thing I noticed is that I have spent far too much
time focusing on gentrification and how it's changing the city. It's difficult
not to talk about it. Some of my favorite neighborhoods have been so radically
changed in the seventeen years I've been here that I barely recognize them and
many of the establishments that I've written about have been lost because of
rent hikes or buyouts. Spanky and Darla's (which was Cheap Shots before that)
is now the Hard Swallow, Mary's is now a veterinarian's office, Barrel &
Fare has gone dark, Matchless has been gutted, Hank's Saloon will be bulldozed
sometime next year (though it will be reincarnated in a food hall at the
western end of the Fulton Mall), and the building where the Mars Bar stood is
now a luxury condo with a TD Bank on the ground floor. It's a subject that gets
a lot of press for a reason.
I've also spent a lot of time meeting people, getting drunk with
them, and just listening to what they have to say. And I don't talk about that
all that often. So, as a change of pace, I'm going to do that, though I'm going
to also go on a long tangent that takes the words of Heraclitus above as it's
starting off point once I've made my initial remarks on one of the archetypal
characters you're likely to meet at any New York City dive bar.
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| Jay Fox |
I've started to call him the gullible skeptic. He's typically at
the end of the bar. He knows the bartender. He knows the regulars. He might
give you a cautious eye if you get too close, and he may even say something out
of the side of their mouth in your direction if you end up waiting for
bartender for more than a minute or two.
He's typically a white man who could be described as an older
millennial—i.e. in his thirties. He typically seems like he's fairly bright and
college educated. He typically is a little shaggy but isn't so poorly groomed
that you think he's drinking away his savings because he just lost his job or
got divorced. Sure, he's not wealthy, but he's not totally broke either. He
seems like he probably has a mildly creative gig that pays enough so that he
can get shitfaced at the bar without stressing about rent come the first of the
month. Perhaps when he sees me, he recognizes something of a kindred
spirit—though a far less curmudgeonly one.
Going back to what I called him originally, the gullible skeptic,
one may think that this is something of an oxymoron. Gullible people typically
aren't skeptical (one who “suspends judgment,” in the words of the Roman
philosopher Sextus Empiricus) and skeptical people aren't gullible. Either
you’re one or the other, but not both—or at least that’s how it’s supposed to
work when you live in normal times.
We, of course, do not live in normal times.
We are living in the midst of a bizarre and increasingly tribal
civil war wherein two political parties that inhabit fiefdoms within the
political landscape of America use misinformation and whataboutism as their
weapons of choice. They use them, not to advance an agenda, but rather to score
cheap political points at the expense of the other. On the one hand, it’s
profoundly unproductive. On the other, the constant undermining of the two
leaves those who don’t identify with either party feeling like our political
system is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and that the institutions the
two parties represent are built upon sand.
And I've found that this atmosphere has an impact on a lot of
people, particularly the gullible skeptic I started to describe above. In the
past, when I started writing these articles, he seemed tethered to something.
He was cynical, but there was a sense of disappointment when a politician
proved to be corrupt or a public figure sacrificed an ideal. He was coarse, but
there was no malice in his words. His jokes were tasteless, but they were just
that: jokes. There was a compass that I wouldn't identify as moral, but it held
him together and kept him from ethical vertigo.
Fast-forward to today and that compass is gone. These men have
drifted into the arms of a kind of nihilism where everyone and everything is
corrupt and, consequently, it's stupid to put your faith in anyone or anything.
Their words are tinged by acid, and that acid grows more apparent and corrosive
the drunker they get. Eventually, their wisecracks cease to be even mildly
amusing. It becomes boldfaced racism or misogyny. The more ostracized they
become, the more they lash out.
They feel persecuted because no one wants to be around them. They
feel as though their freedom of speech has been infringed upon because people
don't want to hear their rape joke. They feel as though P.C. culture has gone
too far because they've been asked to leave the bar for being belligerent and
one drink away from either passing out or vomiting into one of the urinals.
How the hell did we get here? Why are there so many angry and
nihilistic young(ish) men?
No, it's not just Donald Trump. He's a symptom of the disease. For
years, whether it was Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or whoever was the most
provocative douche du jour on Fox News, there have been more vulgar and
horrible people who become increasingly popular for saying increasingly
horrible and vulgar things. Unfortunately, this is one of the sad truths about
America: We love provocateurs. The more vulgar (whether because it’s overly
simplified or because it’s extremely tasteless) an idea is, the more likely it
is to be noticed. The more likely it is to be noticed, the more likely it is to
be repeated. The more likely it is to be repeated, the more likely it is to be
believed.
Initially politics suffered from just the inane kind of vulgarity,
exemplified by such luminaries as Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Todd
“Legitimate Rape” Akin. The more barbarous kind of vulgarity, meanwhile,
remained on television in the form of the Jersey Shore or the
Kardashians vapid show or The Apprentice. However, if there's one thing
America loves more than provocateurs and vulgarity it's synergy, which, of
course, gave us the apotheosis of the vulgar provocateur, Donald Trump—who
early today called a porn star with whom he had an affair, “Horseface.” (The
porn star, meanwhile, accused the President of the United States—from whom she
collected $130,000 after she signed a non-disclosure agreement (that he then
managed to screw up because he forgot to sign it)—of being into bestiality.) No
one really thought it was that weird. It was just, you know, typical news or,
for the former party of pearl-clutching Bible thumpers and members of the Moral
or Silent Majority, Donald being Donald.
So this is part of it: The normalization of vulgarity, which
doesn’t just make our culture coarser. It does more than that. It undermines
the idea that anything really matters beyond the bottom line. Dignity becomes
the type of decorum that only supercilious people give a shit about. Integrity
becomes a liability because it means there are lines that you won’t cross to
get your way, which, in our current political climate of winner-take-all
warfare, is considered abject weakness. Eventually, this kind of amoralistic
outlook leads people to nihilism.
As more institutions abandon any pretense of belonging to some
kind of noble tradition, these nihilists increase in number and they become
bolder, cockier and more hellbent on not being taken. Nothing matters and only
idiots or liars believe otherwise. Their kneejerk reactions to the scent any
kind of faith in a social construction is fierce. Politics: bullshit. The
media: bullshit. The government: bullshit. Anything that is “mainstream” or
“establishment”: bullshit.
To be skeptical of and to captiously look down upon these
institutions becomes a mark of intelligence to this group. Furthermore, when
these institutions fail to live up to the values that they espouse, these
nihilists feel vindicated. They feel as though they have won.
So what does this person believe in?
This is what's interesting. Though they are wont to question
anything they read in the Washington Post or the New York Times
and call you a fool for not questioning what these papers print too, and
though they might call themselves free thinkers or libertarians or whatever,
they are extremely susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that
“they” (the mainstream media, the government, whatever nebulous THEY! they've
invented) don’t want you know. It's really quite remarkable. Some of these
people are willing to believe any piece of evidence that suggests that Obama is
secretly Kenyan, that the Clintons were involved in a pedophilia ring based out
of a pizzeria's basement, that humans are some kind of hybrid race designed by
aliens, that vaccines cause autism or that the United Kingdom will be better
off without Europe. By them a beer and they'll tell you all about the
Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, how 9/11 was an inside job
and that the science behind climate change is all fake and just part of a plot
to nationalize America's golf courses due to an innocuous-sounding (and
non-binding) United Nations action plan known as Agenda 21. Ask them about
history and they'll inform you that the Civil War was not at all about slavery
and that the Muslims somehow managed to be the reason behind the fall of Rome
even if Muhammad was born about a century after the last emperor was deposed.
They can go on for hours.
What you come to find is that these people who pride themselves on
their skepticism, end up becoming total and complete rubes.
So long as you couch whatever message you have in language that
makes its sound subversive or against the mainstream, they'll buy it. It could
be a product (“the secret the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want you know!”),
it could be a politician, it could be a diet, it could be a worldview based on
pseudoscience and a philosophy no serious person has ascribed to in a century.
It doesn't matter. So long as it's against “them,” they are willing to buy it.
(As a case in point, watch Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and
take note of how the narrator uses the term “mainstream” to describe the
beliefs of historians and archaeologists who remain incredulous about “ancient
astronaut theory.”)
So from where does this spite come?
There
are a lot of reasons and I would be a fool to think that I could sum it up with
one overarching source, but I think a lot of it stems from the rage that came
in the wake of the recession. For a lot of Americans, particularly people in my
age group and socioeconomic situation (from a middle class family and in
possession of an undergraduate degree from a relatively good school), the
recession disrupted what was supposed to be our life's trajectory. Perhaps more
importantly, it left us feeling like we were on our own and with a bad taste in
our mouths for the grand institutions of our democracy that gladly handed over
hundreds of billions of dollars (some say the final cost was in the trillions)
to Wall Street in the form of a bailout, but wouldn't lift a finger to provide
for to the majority of people in communities leveled by the foreclosure crisis.
It shattered a lot of illusions.
Even
in the best case scenarios, millions of peoples' careers stagnated and the
stable middle class life that we assumed we would have access to became
illusory. We didn't have the money to get married or to buy a home. For many,
the industry we assumed we'd work in changed radically and ceased to be an
avenue to gainful employment. We were forced to take on two or three part-time
jobs to supplement a salary that either stayed the same or decreased even as
rent started to skyrocket.
After
a few years, the economic indexes began to show that the recession was easing
and that a recovery was underway. However, many of us didn't see it that way.
That stable life remained (and continues to remain) just out of reach as we're
working more, earning less and continuing to feel squeezed by student debt,
credit card debt and diminishing job opportunities in fields that actually pay
a living wage. The resultant instability makes all other issues—immigration,
civil rights, gun control—far more volatile.
To put it in somewhat hyperbolic terms (one appropriate for an era
in which walking clickbait can go from a failed casino tycoon and Page Six
staple to President of the United States), the recession caused a legitimacy
crisis. To put it in a more measured way, a healthy skepticism for the most
important institutions of the economic, political and social system that was
established by the West during and in the direct aftermath of the Cold War
became warped into a deranged and blind contrarianism because we were told that
everything was getting better by mainstream politicians and the media when, in
fact, it wasn't and isn't.
It is this lie, I believe, that is fueling the rage and the
nihilism that one finds when you begin speaking to the asshole at the end of
the bar. This is what dispelled their faith. And it has led them to see the
world in an almost Hobbesian state of chaos wherein trust in any large institution
is impossible and that anything that undermines or questions large institutions
(or those who believe in large institutions) is worthy of their consideration.
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Jay Fox is the author of The Walls and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
