Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism was an apocalyptic, and apoplectic, polemic against post-leftist forms of anarchism. So closely did it approach self-parody that it escaped suspicion on that score only because of the certain fact that Bookchin has no sense of humor. No such certainty attaches to “Nihilism U.S.A. McAnarchy in the Playpen” by someone calling himself Timothy Balash. A shapeless knockoff of SALA, NUSA will find few beginning-to-end readers except those engaging in an egoscan – fandom jargon for skimming a zine looking for your own name. No one has ever heard of Balash, which is probably the pseudonym of someone whose real name, if known, would be a source of discredit, like Bill Brown or Stewart Home. But if NUSA is a debut effort, it is indeed a Titanic one: sunk on its maiden voyage.

Like George Orwell and Theodor Adorno, I believe there is a relationship (but not, of course, a one-to-one relationship) between good writing and true writing. For me to say so is, I admit, self-serving, but what do you expect from a convicted Stirnerist? If there is any truth to this proposition, then there is hardly any truth to NUSA. To read it is to experience genuine suffering. Every known violation of the English language is well represented, as well as abominations so singular as to be, as H.P. Lovecraft might say, unnamable. There are nonexistent words: “abolishment,” “exploitive,” “rompish,” “busking,” “meritous.” Mixed metaphors are the norm. In the very first sentence, anarchism, “a dizzying banquet,” “has failed to make itself heard.” By not burping? In this rompish, busking, but not very meritous vision, one might be “crushed between, on one side, a dress rehearsal” and – well, what difference does it make what’s on the other side? Then there is the “collage of mirrors” and the “cable-fed cloisters.” Necessary words are omitted – “comes [ ] a little surprise” – the reader soon wishes for more of this particular mistake. Disagreement of subject and verb is nearly normative. “Many a hippy ... missed most of their opportunities”; “Lest the reader ... suspect they are beginning to detect”; “Fetishization ... are as cliched and commonplace as” (whatever); and then there’s “the runaway phenomena of the single (and usually impoverished female) parent.”

Altough he has placed his gift to the world on-line, Balash has yet to activate a standard feature of the PC, the spell-checker. It’s true that the spell-checker cannot be counted on to correct misspellings of proper names like Germain Greer, Mann Ray, Eugene O’Neil, and Foucalt, among other of his blunders. But it should signal possible problems with “financil,” “propogates,” “homogenous,” “juvenelia” and “subli” – mine is screaming at me right now. I feel its pain. Although I have taught writing several times, I’m an amateur as a writer as well as a teacher, and I don’t know the names of all of Balash’s mistakes. I don’t know what to call it when he starts a sentence by saying, “The adult consumer ... is able to procure for she and her family,” or “They’re losses should be” something or another. Balash routinely inserts apostrophes where they do not belong and omits them where they do. He also makes just plain dumb vocabulary blunders, as when he refers to “these basic tenants of McAnarchism egoism,” as if egoism was a landlord. The spell-checker is no substitute for a good grade-school education. And – by Bakunin’s balls! – what the hell is a “specious gaze”?

Curiously, Balash blames “public education” for the allure of McAnarchy for “young gullibles.” Presumably he enjoyed the privilege of a private education, confirming the growing suspicion that anarcho-leftists are missionaries from the higher reaches of the middle class who condescend to instill workerism into the workers. (Or try to. Or say that they try to.) The deficits in his own education, however high-priced it was, are palpable. It’s impossible to write as badly as he does without a lot of practice. Someone afflicted by both pedantry and masochism could probably scour the anarcho-leftist journals and identify this illiterate, but the discovery would be unrewarding. Senator, you’re no B. Traven.

Balash is no better than Bookchin at providing any coherent specification of the anarchist objects of his ire. Indeed the task is beyond better minds than theirs. “McAnarchy” is a dumbed-down version of Bookchin’s “lifestyle anarchism,” which was dumb enough already. When you place such a crude and silly label on those you disagree with, you announce that your intention is to insult, not to explain. Balash has, so far as I can tell, many prejudices but only one idea. It goes something like this. In its alleged individualism and actual hedonism, “McAnarchism is also an unconscious regurgitation of one of the high ideals ubiquitously embedded in mass media commercial advertising: personal success is measured by the amount of commercially approved play the adult consumer, merely a big kid with a wallet, is able to procure for she [sic] and her family.” In other words, McAnarchism and Madison Avenue are as one in their message: the good life consists of the passive consumption of well-advertised commodities.

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