1.
On Christmas Eve of 2012, a promising nineteen-year-old rapper from Brooklyn named Capital Steez tweeted THE END and killed himself. I’d only heard about him and his crew, Pro Era, a few months earlier; a student of mine, sixteen, put me on to Joey Bada$$, the hip-hop prodigy at the burning tip of Pro Era’s path across the sky. Bada$$ is one of the best rappers I’ve heard in a long time, but upon my first PE listen (“Survival Tactics,” which I watched on YouTube), it was Steez’s verse, the second, that rang the bell.
Sample lyric: I guess Columbine was listenin to Chaka Khan /And Pokémon wasn’t gettin recognized at Comic-Con / It’s like we’ve been content with losin / And half our students fallen victim to the institution / Jobs are scarce since the Scientific Revolution / And little kids are shootin Uzis cause it’s given to em—
Nineteen years old: that’s how old my students are a year after they graduate. Give or take. Some of them are in college now, and some are in the Marines and some are working/not working. And some are pregnant. Some are in jail. Some are dead. Pretty much all of them have phones that connect to the internet.
My daughter Claire is one-and-a-half now. She can dance to hip hop, but she can’t understand the words—not yet—so I still play it, even the explicit stuff. She’s asleep on the couch while I type this. I put some pillows on the floor at the foot of the couch so if she rolls over and I don’t have time to catch her, the fall won’t hurt, at least not too badly.
2.
I know three people who own AR-15s: one is a friend of mine from summer camp. He used to shout/sing NOFX lyrics from one end of the main lawn, and I’d answer him with the next verse from the other. Sometimes we’d harmonize. We were sixteen-year-old boys.
The last time I was at his place he took me upstairs away from the party and showed me his AR-15 in his bedroom closet. He bought it as legally as he’d bought the house, but he’d since modified it in some way—added something or taken something away—so as to render it illegal.
Then we went downstairs and played Fruit Ninja on his Xbox 360. You just stand in the room and pretend to karate-chop hunks of flying fruit; the Kinect peripheral device senses you, utilizing something you might call infrared 3D imaging technology.
3.
I went the whole day without hearing about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. June picked up Claire, so I didn’t have to bear witness to the palled faces and strangely apologetic assurances of safety at the daycare center. It wasn’t until I got my old car with the misfiring engine to the mechanic’s at four-thirty PM that I learned what had happened in Newtown, Connecticut. I got to watch Fox News footage on the tiny waiting-room set.
My mechanic shouted, “People in this country are fuckin’ losin’ it,” by which he meant the assailant, and I nodded. He’s conservative. He thinks the issue—the stress, the violence, the national mood of terror and helplessness—is the result of unemployment and economic decline. This was back on the first day, when we all still thought the shooter was 24-year-old Ryan Lanza and not his twenty-year-old brother (which in America means still a kid … and probably not so worried about unemployment as my mechanic assumed).
I got home to my family and we all talked it out, to whatever extent we could understand the words. Then I put my daughter to bed. My daughter likes to know that the moon is out before she goes to bed. If we can see it, she waves to it and says goodnight, just like in the book. When it’s cloudy or the moon is out of cycle, she says, Moon is gone, several times—fifteen, sixteen. And sometimes the moon is gone for whole weeks.
4.
In August of 2012, a sixteen-year-old girl was raped by two sixteen-year-old boys in Steubenville, Ohio. The girl was from another town; the boys were on the football team. Before the trial, there were a lot of details; many are still in question, even after the guilty verdict. By then of course, they’d been guilty on the internet for months. Evidence had already been posted, re-posted, proliferated; evidence had gone viral; evidence had been manipulated and re-cut and set to mashup music as a post-ironic joke. You’re best off just to search around using Google if you want the complete picture.
If you want to know more about it. The rape.
Witness for example the twelve-minute clip of M______ N_______, eighteen, who moronically allows himself to be video-recorded saying the most repulsive things about the rape, which was posted to YouTube long enough for it to matter: Dude, she’s dead, he repeats, then he laughs, a zillion times.
He was being hyperbolic, sure. But it’s something. Enough to get you up and away from the internet and convince you to go check on your daughter, make sure she’s breathing in her sleep.
He said a lot of other sick shit, too. Seriously, you have to hear this kid. Tells the camera that she was so gone she got peed on. Said they were “putting the wang in the butthole.” For twelve minutes he goes on like this, entertaining himself and his friends, some of whom can be heard in the background voicing vague protestations: little Jimminy Cricket chirps in the distance.
Everyone (the pundits, the heads, the faces in olde-fashioned TV land) claimed to have watched part of the video and been so disgusted they couldn’t go on; but we all eventually sat back down and finished it, regardless of the initial shock. I’ll finish anything morbid. The worse it makes me feel, the more likely I’ll finish it.
5.
These kids—the Steubenville rape case defendants and bystanders and victim—they’re all the same age as my students. Reading about the case online at nine-o’clock, well after Claire is asleep, puts me to bed uneasy. Then in the morning, at the high school, I see all these sixteen-year-old kids and say “Hi!” and then my mind flashes back to that picture: the tall black kid and the less tall white kid carrying the girl by her ankles and wrists, and it looks like she’s wearing somehow innocuous-seeming navy blue gym shorts and an ash-gray t-shirt, but her form is all pixelled out—not just her face but her body and arms and legs, so you get no read on her whatsoever, you can’t compare her body to a woman’s, you can’t tell if she’s screaming or passed out or perhaps grinning (like maybe they’re just playing a game … a defense attorney did claim, after all, that the photo was taken out of context …).
6.
Kids—people, let’s say—will say anything in the context of a rap song or the internet. The place is like a confessional booth. My sixteen-year-old rap genius student finally convinces me to listen to A$AP Rocky. I go to YouTube and watch the video for “Purple Swag.” It’s the crew puffing herb on a couch. There’s this cute blond teenage girl with grills in her teeth and there’s a close-up of her lip-synching the word swag over and over. It’s a decent song/video.
I read the comments with the little thumbs-up glyphs next to them. One of the most-liked comments says: after this video this chick got fucked harder than she ever has or ever will be by these dudes.
(I get older and older. I go to the pool and swim to try and stay fit. The sun comes up and goes down in fast-forward to a new, unfamiliar soundtrack. My daughter learns the word dance. The word book. The word no.)
My student, the hip-hop aficionado, tells me Joey Bada$$ is bringing back the nineties. That’s how all the bloggers are putting it. He goes, “I mean you got to live through the nineties …” He calls it the Golden Age of Rap the way I call the eighties the Golden Age of Rap.
Sample misogynistic rap lyric from the nineties: Mister, mister, before you let me go / I’m here to let you know your little girl is a hoe / nympho, nympho, boy is she bad / get her all alone and out come the knee-pads / I know she is a minor and it is illegal / but the bitch is worse than Vanessa del Rio / and if you decide to call rape / we got the little hooker on tape. Now, / tell the fuckin slut to please hurry up / and wear that dress that’s tight on her butt […]. I could go on. I know the whole song by heart.
I used to blast this song in my parents’ Volvo on the way to school, my fifteen-year-old sister in the passenger seat. She’d sing along with me. And now, despite my general moral aloofness to violence in a song (or drugs, or racism, or casual sexist and homophobic slang), I cannot listen to this song with my daughter; nor can I rap along to it with the same cocksure abandon as I did at sixteen, when I was a virgin and a student and a son.
(Vanessa del Rio, by the way, is sixty. Wikipedia lists her as “a retired pornographic actress.” Prior to tonight, my only knowledge of her existence came from this Ice Cube lyric.)
7.
So as the Steubenville, Ohio, rape story plays out on increasingly wider media circuits (local blog, The New York Times, mycelial internet community-at-large), the hacker activist group Anonymous gets hold of N_______’s video, saves it for posterity, and then gains illicit access to the Steubenville High School website, student records, and various email accounts. They threaten to release personally identifying information about all students and staff members that they (that is, KnightSec: a subsidiary of the decentralized Anonymous movement) consider guilty. Even the bystanders.
Especially the bystanders, guilty by silence and inaction.
Additionally, KnightSec alleges a massive conspiracy of small-town pornographers and drug-dealers, a seething caldera of decadence just beneath the surface of this mid-western town that is just football crazy. A bizarre and demonic underbelly, like something out of Lynch.
(In writing this essay, I have to keep checking stuff on the internet to make sure I have the words right/sufficiently wrong: AR-15, Fruit Slice, what Steez tweeted before he killed himself. And it’s like ducking into the village to snap some pictures of the carnage—raped girls and blown-apart bodies, hunks of dead livestock stuffed into the community well. There’s no reason to think we’re not dead since the Mayan apocalypse of 2012.)
8.
The other two people (men) I know with AR-15s are both former students, favorites of mine, nineteen and twenty, respectively. The first is a Marine. In school he was a perpetual-detention kid: bigot, pit fighter, a monster wrestler in high school once he got his shit straight. He’s on leave before his first tour (Mediterranean, offshore from Syria), and he shows up one day in my classroom at 7:25 AM.
He tells me he owns a semi-automatic Bushmaster of his own and is training as a gunner in the US Marine corps and what, he’s going to serve his country and then come back home and they take his weapon away?
The second works in the boiler room of a steel mill, seven-to-seven, three days a week. He comes by after school with his two-year-old daughter. He shows me a picture of the AR-15 on his cell phone and says, “Yep … there’s my toy.” He says of the recent Sandy Hook Elementary massacre: “Look, everyone’s all upset about this tragedy, and I’m upset about it, and it’s a horrible thing, but they allow abortion, which if you think about it is pretty much the same thing, except on a bigger scale.”
Both of these guys—my former students—think the government is going to take away their guns, the Marine going so far as to suggest/joke that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged by the government as a justification for taking away our guns. He recommends I watch a particular YouTube video on this theory.
Three days later, I write him a letter; in it, I recommend he watch a particular YouTube video on the conflict in Syria. But the kid who’s supposed to deliver it to him at his sendoff party gets drunk and forgets it in his sweatshirt pocket, so he shoves off to the Eastern Mediterranean and I never see him again.
9.
Poor Kurt Cobain. Getting fucked by his so-called fans over his lyrics for twenty years. In the nineties, it was two boys raping a girl while singing the lyrics to “Polly.” And last fall, the dumbass N_______ kid (he of Steubenville-rape-case internet fame) tweeted: SONG OF THE NIGHT IS DEFINITELY RAPE ME BY NIRVANA. The worst kind of fate/fame: perpetually misunderstood (by kids—boys) in this most vile manner, even though you were a self-alleged feminist in life.
From Joey Bada$$’s “Funky Hoes”: […] All it takes is some exotic piff / They all unconscious topless exposing they crotch and shit […]. I can’t help but love his flow, and the Lord Finesse groove Bada$$ copped for this song, but crotch rubs me particularly wrong. It’s like he jumped over the rhyme and ended up in the mud, the worst kind of sexy: where the joke gets necrotic, dirty old man-like. I’m made old listening to it. I get so old I grow out of hip hop, which is the saddest thing I can think of this side of a dead child.
Rap’s always been a metaphor for a dead child. That’s why America and I are fascinated with it.
I go to the pool to swim and, inexplicably, there’s a letter-to-the-editor from the local paper framed up on the wall in the locker room, and I read it while I strip. It’s by a senior citizen, a woman, explaining what a hell it is to grow old in the digital world surrounded by kids who act like they might just tear your limbs off at any second; and meanwhile you have to watch all your friends die, and you’re getting bombarded with ads for porn and penis enlargement when you try to stay in touch with your children and your grandchildren though email. Anyway, the crux of the epistle is that faith is the one thing that sustains her in these dark times.
To my former students, I’m like, “Dude, you think the government is going to take away people’s guns? Maybe a restriction, maybe a buy-back, but we don’t live in a country where the police/military are going to raid civilian homes to confiscate weapons.”
What kind of country do you think this is.
10.
Claire learns that when someone shoves you out of the way or tries to push you down a slide before you’re ready, you can protest and say no and my body and no pushing. I tell her I’m proud, but I know that if words mattered, violence would be over and the world could rap about love and art.
I can’t say I don’t love the idea of a strong young woman who appreciates hip hop: calling her my daughter. So will I raise a militant relativist?
11.
Panic: I’ll bump only instrumentals. I’ll first disconnect and then destroy the television. I’ll banish the internet—no, I’ll keep the internet so I can do research. But I’ll keep it upstairs. Or I’ll teach her how to use it responsibly. How to cope. How to stave off the craving, the morbidity, the death wish. If such a lesson can be taught—we’ll find out, probably soon.
12.
It’s not as though Anonymous is a faction dedicated to policing the internet or a faction dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist patriarchy or a faction dedicated to fighting racism and sexism and bigotry in all its forms. Anonymous is not a faction. It’s an impulse. That disgusted mix of hatred and titillation I feel when I read about the Steubenville rape case; when I read N_______’s dip-shit tweets about it the day afterward (this fucking kid, right? Doesn’t know when to quit …); when I read the words much circulated photo in a CNN.com article and then go to Google Images and type ohio rape case and scan what comes up; when I rap along with Big-L (another dead black kid from the New York City of the nineties) when he brags, I’ll even fuck a dead bitch …
That feeling that we had when we asked ourselves if we really wanted to know more about the Connecticut shooting and then decided that we did and then opened up our laptops or kindled our smartphones and googled the words sandy hook; that feeling we had that night when we were trying to go to sleep. That’s what Anonymous is: the superego of the novel digital mind-at-large. It’s a bad feeling, but at least we have it. If there’s a hope to grab onto, it’s that we still have that bad feeling.
The organism is ill, psycho-spiritually. But antibodies are being developed/are developing.
13.
I love my students but I hate their generation. I love literature but I hate filling out concerned-persons forms for sick students. I love my daughter but I hate her future. I love her father but I hate his mind. I love rap music but I hate thinking of a girl crying when she gives a blowjob. I love drinking coffee but I hate being awake. I love freedom of information but I hate the media. I love the moon but I hate saying goodnight. I love the romance of suicide but I hate the reality of non-being. I love sex but I hate what we’ve born you into.
All in all, I picked up like nineteen tracking cookies while searching for info to write this essay.
14.
And so I tell her:
It’s not guns. It’s not rap. It’s not drugs. It’s not video games. It’s not sexual violence. It’s not men/patriarchy. There is still loud music to dance to. It’s not capitalism. It’s not religion/lack of religion. It’s not sexy ads and clothes. It’s not public education. There are still words that drip in the mouth like honey. It’s not the internet. It’s not digital flirting. It’s not insomnia. It’s not isolation. There is still a warm finger on the mouse pad, and the feeling of a warm finger on a mouse pad. It’s not football/war. It’s not Anonymous. It’s not the one-percent. It’s not Islamic extremism. It’s not conservatives/liberals. There is still a heartbeat in the night, in the deepest nightmare. It’s not unemployment. It’s not marriage/divorce. It’s not race/class/gender. It’s not the moon or the stars or the sun. It’s not you. It’s not me.
It’s okay. It’s still true, palpable. It’s still real. It’s still here. I’m still here. I’ve got you. It’s going to be all right. We’re all here. We’re all safe. It’s going to be okay.
_________________________________
2012, 2013
Additional editing and consultation: Tara DaPra
