The goading life

The writer Jim Goad has been reported to have died.

“Writer” doesn’t really work as a description for Goad. A lot of his work might be better described as events than literature — far more talked about than it was actually read.

Answer Me!, which Goad created with his then wife Debbie, was a 1990s zine which was a portent of 2000s internet culture — obscene, provocative, cynical and eclectic. It didn’t have a mainstream audience but it left a footprint in the mainstream’s buttocks. People were charged with obscenity for selling it. A man who shot up the White House was allegedly inspired by it. 

Yet Goad was a writer as well as a provocateur. On the strength of Answer Me!, he earned a cautious invitation into the mainstream’s home. Simon & Schuster published his book The Redneck Manifesto — a furious polemic which argued that prejudice against working class white people was the last acceptable form of bigotry, and which smartly anticipated Trumpism. Goad appeared on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect to make his acerbic case.

He never reached such heights again. Goad was jailed in the late 1990s after beating up his girlfriend. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, and I don’t know what kind of man Mr Goad was in more recent years, but when cheating on his wife as she struggled with cancer was something he’d admit to, I’d hate to know what kind of thing he’d have denied. I mention this because being quite so anti-social makes it vaguely absurd to be quite as absorbed as Goad became by (a) personal grievances and (b) the more dysfunctional elements of ethnic minorities. (He became a prolific contributor to publications of the “alt-right”.)

But you can’t accuse Goad of laying claim to virtue — and interesting people are often less than wholesome. Goad was an important and pioneering figure in transgressive culture. While a lot of people have made a lot of money poking fun at moralistic progressives, Goad did the rhetorical equivalent of poking them in the eye. He was quick-witted and eloquent enough to impress as well as outrage.

The Redneck Manifesto bore the subtitle “America’s Scapegoats: How We Got That Way And Why We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore” — but the “we” was partially misleading. Goad had a tough background but far from being a trucker or a lumberjack, he was a journalism graduate from Temple University. Like Gavin McInnes, who went from co-founding Vice to founding the Proud Boys, he loved winding up the libs because he came from the same proto-hipster circles. 

Long before anyone had created 4Chan or Something Awful, transgressive culture thrived amid independent publishing outlets and record labels. As well as Answer Me!, there was Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture or Michael Hoy’s Loompanics Unlimited.

Goad was about as likely to apologise for offending people as a hyena is likely to regret eating an antelope

Some came to regret their participation in this niche aesthetic and intellectual free-for-all — framing it as being the product of a juvenile desire to shock. The producer Steve Albini spent a lot of time apologising for stunts like having a band called “Rapeman”, while the comedian Patton Oswalt went from having friendly debates with Jim Goad to wringing his hands just for being friends with Dave Chappelle. (This author thinks that unless you’re going to Kim Jong Un’s birthday party, you should be friends with whoever you like.)

Goad was about as likely to apologise for offending people as a hyena is likely to regret eating an antelope. He was always scathing on the subject of leftist pieties. When Steve Albini argued that “anti-woke” commentators are anti-creative inasmuch as they are anti-progress, for example (and, yes, that’s quite enough of the suffix “anti-”), Goad sneered:

The idea that one plus one equals two should stay the way it is. To allege that it actually equals three is a dangerously illogical regression, not progress. Not all change is good, unless you think a normal cell mutating into a cancerous one is a move in the right direction.

True enough. But I’m not sure I believe what Goad wrote later on:

What’s semantically annoying about the term “edgelord” is that it implies insincerity. It also implies that the alleged edgelord cares about the feelings of the people who read or hear his opinions so much that he merely wants to offend them rather than express a heartfelt point.

Maybe. But this sounds a bit like G.G. Allin saying, “Shock value? Me?” I think Goad had sincere beliefs but that he developed them oppositionally, and that this oppositional attitude gave them a certain shape and texture. What I think ‘90s counter-culture could lack, and 21st century online culture can lack, is the positive conviction that makes cynicism even worth expressing. Does “counter-culture” mean culture that runs counter to expectations or culture that is merely reactive? Culture can be reactive, of course, but it should be more than that.

I remember stumbling across a livestream in which Goad was exchanging insults with a group of younger online provocateurs. None of them found him shocking or outrageous. To them, he was just a lame old man. Depend on transgression and you will inevitably end up being transgressed against.