Interesting stuff from Lucifur Benway:
Jake Robida and I have two meaningful things in common. First, we both grew up in the cultural sewer of BC. Second, we both allied ourselves with a myth to give a lackluster life a little bit of meaning. While I gravitated towards hardcore, Wu-Tang and beatniks, Jake caught the destructive meme of white supremacy and allied himself with the aggressively ignorant, misogynist and homophobic “Juggalo” subculture. Consider our mutual selection of vastly different myth structures a “point of divergence” in the What If…? mold- in an alternate universe I no doubt showed up at my high school, guns blazing with my face painted up like some bad John Wayne Gacy fanboy while Jake went on to write for Key93. While I found myself fortunate to fall into the orbit of dope-smoking Cambodians and acid-addled skaters, Jake fell in with those who embraced and fetishized their repressions and self-loathings. There but for the grace of “Bob” go I.
What if someone had handed Jake a copy of the Invisibles, a Disinformation anthology, or a Sun Ra record during his formative years? Might a Burroughs novel may have done something to nurture what clearly seem to be some heavily repressed homosexual feelings. What if someone had given Jake something to believe in rather than an ethos which merely operated as window dressing for nihilism, repression, self-hatred, black solipsism and fear of novelty? “A stopped clock is right twice a day” and the Jesus-worshippers who wail and moan about the culture war don’t live in another spacetime continuum.
But who wants to use the same boring, bullshit terms as that lot? I prefer to think of it as Myth Wars.