And then it gets depressing.
Drudge sings the praises of Alex Jones. He sees the radio host as a lonely man who wages war against that corporate homogeneity, which is true from a certain perspective, but which ignores the true insanity of Alex Jones, a person who believes that the late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley was a robot built by Muslims.
At first, it feels like maybe Drudge is being polite.
But then he starts throwing out his own crazy ideas.
He suggests there’s a cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s lovers, with the implication being that there’s scores of women who’ve had the former Secretary of State’s tongue in their birth canals.
He says that Clinton is old and sick and that there’s a cover-up about her impending death.
He claims there are 80 million illegal immigrants living in the US.
Things are different than back in 1997 AD.
The coherent worldview has changed and encompassed some very dubious thoughts.
There’s an edge in this interview that’s nowhere to be seen in the early days.
This is a person who knows that he’ll never be understood.
While Michael Kinsley sneered at Drudge for an hour in 1997 AD, he was wrapped in a delusion about the nature of his job. He thought that he was a person who offered the world a valuable service, but actually, all he did was lure people into looking at advertisements.
In the video, he can’t imagine that, within about twelve years, it’ll turn out that the Internet is better at advertising than newspapers, and that his colleagues in journalism, all the hallowed practitioners of the art, are going to be chasing Patient Zero’s vision of the future, reducing institutions of sober judgment into op-ed factories that, try as hard as they might, will never be able to compete with the sheer entertainment psychosis of a seventeen-year-old denouncing Jews on YouTube.
Another thing that he can’t imagine: by the Year of the Froward Worm, anonymous and unsupported allegations on the Internet will be the backbone of his entire industry.
And the last thing that Kinsley can’t imagine is that he’s insulting the one person who could have helped.
Drudge was, and is, the only person who understands the Internet.
And he was insulted so badly that he sought refuge with the scum of the world, and he took all of that genius and all of its attendant power, and he befriended the people who were nice to him.
That’s how history works.
That’s how politics work.
You figure out how to get along with people you find unpalatable. You figure out how to make a decent argument that convinces people who don’t agree with you. You don’t throw away people because you think they’re powerless and worthless.
Or you end up like Michael Kinsley.
Totally forgotten and left behind.
Just a smug asshole no one remembers in a video that no one watches.
Here’s a pro-tip for the Democrats.
If you want to win Presidential elections, there’s a very simple thing that you can do.
It’s too late to harness Matt Drudge’s unbelievable influence over the national dialogue.
He’s an autodidact and you insulted him.
You can’t make friends now.
But you could always kill him.
Call out the Clinton death squads!
Chapter Thirteen
Routine Humiliations
To understand how I ended up being sexually harassed in front of 280 people by a woman who pens New York Times opinion pieces on the topic of sexual harassment, you have to understand what my career was like before the success of my novel I Hate the Internet.
It was non-existent.
I’d published a novella called ATTA, which was a psychedelic biography of the lead 9/11 hijacker.
It had moved a surprising amount of copies for a short work published on an independent press, and generated a great deal of secondary academic writing, but for a variety of reasons, no one noticed that any of this had happened.
After ATTA came out, I worked on another book, which would eventually turn into The Future Won’t Be Long. I wasted two years trying to get the thing published.
None of it came to anything.
When I wrote ATTA, I was living in Los Angeles.
By the time that it was published in 2011 AD, I had moved to San Francisco.
In 2014 AD, I moved from San Francisco and ended up back in Los Angeles.
While I lived in San Francisco, the only positive thing that had happened, career wise, was that I ended up doing a writer’s residency in rural Denmark.
This was in the summer of 2013 AD.
While I was at the residency, I met the Danish writer Dorthe Nors.
In addition to being a truly lovely person, Dorthe also happens to be one of the best writers in the world. Her books Minna Needs Rehearsal Space and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal are fucking intellectual masterpieces.
But she’s a woman, which means that while she’s become very successful, her work is always reviewed in a specific way: no one pays attention to the intellect and everyone looks for the moral instruction.
Dorthe and I became friends.
She was on the cusp of becoming a literary superstar.
In 2017 AD, she was nominated for a Man Booker International.
No one deserved the award more.
In the unique case of Dorthe, I suspend my disdain for awards.
Dorthe doesn’t just deserve the Man Booker International.
She deserves every award.
She should win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She should win Motor Trend’s Car of the Year.
Bad Sex in Fiction!
As Dorthe was transforming into a superstar, she helped me out in whatever ways that she could. This is how I ended up getting an email in the summer of 2014 AD from a guy named Adrian Todd Zuniga.
Adrian Todd Zuniga is the founder and the host of a thing called Literary Death Match.
He’d met Dorthe somewhere in Europe, at one of the ten billion literary festivals that extend invitations to Dorthe.
She told him that he should have me participate in Literary Death Match.
So he reached out.
I said yes.
Saying yes to Literary Death Match was a moral compromise of the highest order.
To understand why, I need to explain the thing.
Literary Death Match works like this: four writers are given the opportunity to read their work.
Unlike normal readings, Literary Death Match happens in two rounds.
In each round, two writers perform their work, and then their work is critiqued by three judges. These judges are often celebrities.
The judges choose one writer as the victor of each round, and then the two victors face off against one another in a final round which involves a humiliating game.
Whoever demonstrates the greatest capacity for making a fool of themselves is the winner of Literary Death Match.
This is awful shit. It’s the clusterfuck of debasement that has overtaken writing.
Everyone pretends that they’re on the same side, everyone pretends that they’re friends, and everyone makes awful pronouncements about the seriousness of their work while maintaining their aw shucks relatability, and sometimes writers are rewarded for their pomposity with badly rendered line drawings of their faces on bookshop walls.
And sometimes, if the writer is a good little boy, people will reward his pomposity with the gift of a tote bag.
Most of these tote bags have an aphorism or a logo printed on their sides.
The aphorisms and logos are always very positive about publishing.