Fuck Existentialism, dude. Read Dickens

When did 'being a man' mean you licked the boots of fascists?

In Niantic, Connecticut there’s a used bookstore called the Book Barn that a boomer at our B&B likened to the East Coast version of Portland’s Powells. That is, tons and tons of used books, all in an actual barn with hip, tattooed and/or bearded workers helping you find what you need. I bought Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, for $1, as well as Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and a novel by Pete Hamill (I wrote about his memoir A Drinking Life a year or so ago).

I’d always been a Vonnegut fan (and was friends with his grandson in college!) but I’d forgotten how incisive he was in his criticism of capitalism, consumerism, racism and other ills of 20th century society. Well, in this novel in particular, he takes no prisoners. Listen to this one passage:

Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on the blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

I just want to point this out in reference to the hundreds of thousands of Gen Xers and millennials who cry, “How come we didn’t learn about [XXX] in school? “ Well, did you pick up any novels during your time there? Did you read Vonnegut, or Kerouac, or Hemingway or Carver? Because people BEEN talking about the horrors of the American empire since it became an empire!!! Just because you made a TikTok about Native American life before European colonization doesn’t mean you discovered that fact!!!!I

This brings me to the title of this essay.

When I was 20 I worked as a gofer at a small theater company in New England. My daily life was pretty monotonous, sweeping, mopping, answering the phone, and filing stuff. Then one day, this tattooed, British accented-dude showed up to direct a play about–wait of it–SEX, and my summer job and life changed forever. This guy was everything a provincial summer theater was not: cool, rash, sarcastic, worldly, and vaguely addicted to a lot of chemical substances. I was reading Camus’ The Stranger in the office one day on my lunch break, and he walked by.

Whatcha readin’, mate?

Camus.

Fuck existentialism, dude, read Dickens.

I cannot tell you how much that simple sentence shook me to my core on so many levels. Here are some of the levels on which they shook me:

1. I’d never heard intellectual pursuits talked about in a tone other than stuffy, academic reverence. The fact that a guy who smoke a lot of pot, rock climbed, and wooed local women would ALSO be into reading wordy, literary tomes blew my frickin’ mind.

2. He was right. See below.

I had been introduced to existentialism by other dudes, mostly. If I had a nickel for every guy in college who swore Nietszche or Kierkegaard were their north store then I’d probably have paid my tuition on that alone. It was so fucking cool to swagger into a house party in dirty jeans and a paint-splattered flannel, only to retire to a corner talking about Kant with some fellow undergrad. Existentialism was a status symbol at my school.

But my new mentor had a point, I realized, after I read Hard Times. Yes, Camus and Sartre and others wrote these dense novels that had something to say, but tell me why Dickens was able to do the same bloody thing and also create living, breathing characters that stayed with you years after you read them. In Hard Times (which I read in the height of Bush/Rove/Cheney McCarthyism), there’s a wealthy factory owner who justifies his cruelty towards his workers by bragging about how ‘I came from nothing!’ This could have been written about Bush himself, and yet it was written 150 years before.

Vonnegut, especially Breakfast of Champions, is the same way. It’s got a story and two main characters who grip you from page one, while also clearly being about the depravity of the American empire. It makes me wonder, too, with all the handwringing and millions of DNC dollars being spent to appeal to young men–if maybe we'd be better off if they all just read more Vonnegut and Hemingway and Kerouac.

This all reminds me of one of my favorite lines in a Dropkick Murphy’s song called Wicked Sensitive Crew, where they compare themselves to the people who are performatively tough, whom they describe as ‘pop-punk tough guys with neck tattoos’.

The Murphys sing, “If these guys are hard [pronounced ‘hahd’] than I’d rather be soft. I need to mind myself a wicked sensitive crew.”

Long before podcast took off, let alone the ‘manosphere’ became a household term, I listened to this song and really related to this line in particular. Throughout my childhood, I was pinned as being a soft, wide-eyed innocent, and because I was taught to be sensitive to what others are going through before casting judgement, I let them categorize me that way. After a while, though, this persona I put out there just didn’t mesh with my actions or how I felt inside. A year or so after college, a friend of mine recognized that in an email he wrote to me. I had sent him a script I wrote, and he said it sounded like I had basically written a bunch of characters to sound like another friend of ours.

“You don’t need to sound like him to be tough, Jesse. I remember you telling me about the stuff you went through in high school. You ARE tough for getting through that! Be yourself.”

It was good to hear, but I didn’t really believe it for long. Too many people kept assuming because I was polite and kind and sensitive to their needs and feelings that I must have never ever had a bad day in my life. In fact, one day the director who recommended I read Dickens was hanging out in my house after work, when my dad came home and said, “Hi family, how’s everybody doing?” Later he jokingly chided me, “Dude, you’re never going to be a writer. Your family life is too wholesome.”

Again, did I let him know about my father’s near fatal illness that happened right after I was born? And how it had left him paralyzed from the knees down? Did I say, ‘Well actually,’ and mention the generational trauma of his dad’s survival of the Armenian Genocide? And how hard it was when he had a stroke, and then passed away in the fall of my Freshman year of high school? Nope. I Did not. I just laughed, and assumed he was right.

So for a very long time I had this weird disconnect between how I felt and how people perceived me, and a lot of that was exacerbated by the aforementioned ‘pop punk tough guys’. Not just literally them, I don’t mean to rag on one group. It also included people who made their entire personality about listening to heavy music, or doing drugs, or ‘fighting the man’. I related to their anger, but never really got accepted because I dressed pretty nondescript, didn’t get in people’s faces, or argue with strangers about politics. I wanted to respect people’s pain and trauma, so I never told them about mine.

The Trump era, therefore, has been a real awakening for me, in my middle age. Now there’s another group I need to make room for: the angry young men who were left behind by society. Nevermind that some of those ‘left behind’ still have families that care for them, colleges that accepted them, and jobs that make a living. No, they are victims, and both the left and right are telling us all to feel bad for them, and check our own privilege for not being as hard up as they are. We’re asked to understand their warped sense of masculinity and being tough, but this is where I had to draw the line. They only hate women because women are getting ahead of men! They only are broke because capitalism has destroyed the workplace! Nobody makes things with their hands anymore! Etc etc. But while women, as well as men of other races have found ways to adapt, white dudes didn’t adapt and it’s the rest of our faults for not letting them be MEN.

No thanks. To paraphrase the Dropkick Murphy’s song, if that’s being hard I’d rather be soft. The men I looked up to when I was young were Hemingway, and Kerouac and Vonnegut. These were definitively masculine heroes, who went to war, hitched rides on freight trains, and skewered the elites in their writing. They also, however, showed empathy to others. They weren’t afraid to talk in poetry, and to stop and smell flowers, literally. The idea that it’s somehow tough and strong to hide behind a keyboard all day, while worshipping at some Twitch streamer or podcaster’s feet is bullshit. Even racists like John Wayne made their mark in movies like the Searchers where his whole thing was trying to help and protect the weaker folks, not let them languish and suffer the way Stephen Miller, Trump and Vance do.

Last story:

One time, when I was working for the construction company, my boss went behind the carpentry sub’s back, and got a bid by another contractor. The first sub found out indirectly, came storming into my trailer office and pounded on the desk in front of me until his gold chain fell off. What did he say, “He’s not a man! He’s not a man for doing this!” Being a man wasn’t about hurting others, it was about being forthright and honest in your dealings.

Regardless of what the MAGA hordes say, I’d rather be a man by reading books, making films, looking out for others, taking care of my family and my neighbors. If that’s being ‘soft’, so be it.