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I used to build bombs in my basement. My friend, a guy who called himself Damage Inc. on the BBSes, built pipe bombs and made a rocket launcher that shot small Estes rockets tipped with razors. We set them off in abandoned fields and fired rockets into trees. We lived in Columbus, Ohio, where there were wide stretches of open field and wide vistas of open time and we were bored and we made and did things that would have got us arrested today.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t excuse my behavior and this isn\u2019t an epistle about the artist as a shitty young man. I was a curious kid and the interest all sorts of things \u2013 bombs, guns, WWII \u2013 was part of that curiosity. It was partially morbid and partially historical \u2013 my family had visited Auschwitz on an early trip to Poland and it effected me deeply \u2013 and partially subversive. It was also gross and wrong, although I couldn\u2019t have told you that in 1990.<\/p>\n
I see a lot of what I was doing back then in what\u2019s happening today.<\/p>\n
But what\u2019s happening today is far more visible, far more violent, and far scarier than two kids in a suburban tract home shooting Estes rockets at hay bales. There is a penchant for lonely, introverted males to invest deeply in cultures that will accept them. There\u2019s a reason Gamergate happened, the reason 4chan is such a roiling pit of snakes, and a reason there is an entire culture dedicated to the \u201cmaintenance of the white race.\u201d Again, there is no excuse for it but I believe we can, in time, learn to stem the tide of young men turning toward insurrectionist philosophies as a relief valve for societal, sexual, and positional pressure. At least I hope we can.<\/p>\n
First, understand that I didn\u2019t enter my fascination with violence in a vacuum. Unlike many of the current espousers of Blut und Boden<\/em> my grandfather Herman actually landed at Normandy and, according to lore, pulled a Luger off of a dead German. That\u2019s the same Luger he eventually pulled out during a 1950s cocktail party in Martins Ferry and accidentally shot into the ceiling of my grandparent\u2019s home. My father, for his part, sat out Vietnam because of his eyesight and seemed lesser for it so he made up for by researching the history of the World Wars. He told me about World War II and the horrors therein. He bought me books on the holocaust and gave me the Painted Bird<\/em> by Jerzy Kosinski, a book about a boy\u2019s travels through the Boschian hellscape that was Poland during the war.<\/p>\n All of this melded into the subversive nature of the nascent Internet and DInc. and I reveled in it. We hung out on bulletin boards and chatted at all hours. We weren\u2019t crass, as far as I remember, but we were totally into bombs and the Anarchist\u2019s Bible and general mayhem. Why we didn\u2019t act on these impulses in a more damaging way is unclear \u2013 I\u2019ve heard far worse coming-of-age stories from this era ranging from theft to arson \u2013 but we managed to sail that rocky strait and steer clear into college where childish things were forgotten.<\/p>\n I worry that in today\u2019s experience the child is born, socialized, and finds his friends online. My own son was talking to kids in Sri Lanka while playing Minecraft at age 9 and he now keeps contact with a small coterie of players who have moved from snakes.io to slightly more violent games. I try to keep him in check but there will be a time when that will be impossible.<\/p>\n Further, when all your friends are online you don\u2019t make many in real life. This further isolates you in the real world and ensures that any poison dripped in your ear via IRC or forums is taken readily and greedily. It frankly frightens me as a father.<\/p>\n I was lucky. I had a friend, Rick, that like to play guitar. We wrote songs. I had a good teacher, Mrs. DeFrancis, who made me love English. I had good friends off of the computer because in 1993, the year I graduated, the Internet could not suck me in, it did not metastasize my youthful rebellion into a belief in real hate. I explored boundaries of good taste but those boundaries were not rendered elastic by the endless expanse of social media.<\/p>\n