Please Kill Me

Years from now, when Chinese scholars pick through the remains of the once-mighty American empire, trying to figure out how the most advanced civilization in history collapsed so spectacularly against a bunch of glorified pipe-bombers, they will make a shocking discovery: Chuck Klosterman killed America. He killed us quietly and painlessly, poisoning the culture like a malarial mosquito working on an unsuspecting African child's ankle. He's doing it right now as you're reading this, and he did it last year, the year before that, and will do so in the years to come.

He didn't kill just 85 per cent of this great country, as his new book's title, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, suggests. That's just Chuck affecting a self-deprecating stance. No folks, he killed everything, even the things that were already dead. While Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda hogged the glory, Chuck played the Medusa, beaming his smirk-rays through his lethally ironic thick-rimmed glasses straight into the bloodstream of America's popular culture, turning the Gorgon of Liberty into chalk dust.

I don't know how else to begin this account of Klosterman's new book, except to judge it from the future, as an epitaph written in advance. Because this book is already a runaway bestseller. I did everything I could to stop him two years ago. I warned as many earthlings as possible of the danger. But they wouldn't listen. "He's just a pop culture writer," people told me. "What's the big deal?"

That's probably what Montezuma's advisors told him when they presented the Aztec leader with Cortez's gifts: "They're just blankets, Your Excellency. What's the big deal?"

All of the elements that made Klosterman's last book, 2003's Sex Lies and Cocoa Puffs, so insidious are here once again, only now they've become more brazen, more confident: the cheap affections, the fake stances, the bad flip-flops, the relentless gentrification.

But this time around, all of these are a given, and form the major premise from which he and his demographic move on to the larger goal. For Klosterman, killing off old icons was merely a test-run, softening up the defenses. This time around, it's a given that everything is gutted, with very few exceptions. Like punk. He still can't get over punk.

Whereas in his last book, Klosterman compared himself and a girlfriend to Sid & Nancy because they were so "crazy," staying up all night watching movies, this time around Klosterman bares his real feelings: "punk rockin almost every contextis patently ridiculous." Now, Sid is "an idiot" while Nancy was "(at best) a drug-addled groupie."

This may strike some readers as a bad ethos move on Klosterman's part, wearing his reactionary ignorance on his sleeve. But that's missing the point. By engaging these hallowed figures like a crabby old vice principal, he's announcing that the debate is now closed and not worth discussing. The clock has been rolled back to 1975but not the 1975 of division and cultural clash; rather, the contemporary Classic Rock version of 1975the safe, familiar, reactionary version which is to South Park Republicans what the 1950s were to the ascendant Reagan Right.

The ostensible subject of the book could have been interesting: Klosterman plans to make a road trip around the country in order to investigate and experience first-hand the points where dozens of legendary rock 'n' roll deaths and suicides took place, in order to make sense of the relationship between death, pain, fame and art.

But being the postmodern-ish guy that Chuck thinks he is, he uses the stated plot-frame as a mere backdrop; the book becomes a pre-ordained attempt at a picaresque of the failed quest genre. The heroes aren't tragic cult figures from the rock world, but rather the kinds of obnoxiously bland, whiny Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers who make you think that maybe a full military draft might not be such a bad thing, if only to clear out the racket. Instead, they're yammering fills up nearly every line on every page. I found myself thinking thoughts that, if aired, would land my ass in Jose Padilla's cell, perhaps the only place in America that is certified ironic-whiny-free.

In more honest and talented handslike Hunter Thompson's, or even those of Sherman's March author Ross McElweethe failed-quest picaresque formula can be mind-blowing. But like a lukewarm Heat Meiser, everything Klosterman touches loses color and nerve; his purpose, as set out from the beginning, is to stop all this mind-blowing business, and promote a new culture in which the very possibility of danger or surprise is banished.

"I am a marijuana person," Chuck declares. Who woulda guessed?

Klosterman's goal is to blandify not only pop culture, but every aspect of American Life. He effects this by employing not the voice of a 33-year-old man, but rather the self-obsessed whine of a watch-me-being-cute Valley Girl as reinterpreted though the kind of guy who hung around his high school parking lot years after graduating. A typical stream of consciousness reads:

"Diane is not actually my girlfriend, and Lenore lives 2,000 miles to the west. But there is a reason talking about being in love with Diane makes me think of Lenore, and it's the same reason I was thinking about Diane a few weeks ago when I kissed Lenore good-bye and told her I'd see her in a month."

After visiting his parents, the Midwesterner gushes, "I am so unbelievably glad my parents don't mind that they don't know any details about my life. They don't understand me, but they understand me." Like, you know?

The repetition of the Klosterman-tag "but ANYWAY" is the creepiest part to his trans-gender/trans-generational voice: "But ANYWAY, Sarah Jackson started dragging Lenore into the vinyl bar booth that I essentially lived in, and we started hard-core, bone-crushing, kamikadze." "But ANYWAY, I was pretty sure that particular weekend was the last time I would ever see Lenore." "ANYWAY, by the time you read this sentence, the song I am referring to will be ten thousand years old."

Oh, and he totally talks to his girlfriends about shopping, and whenever he's supposed to be investigating some rock death, instead he writes about his imaginary hissy fits he has while driving and listening to ironic bands: "What if I became retarded?" he imagines arguing to one of his imaginary girlfriends. "What if I decided to stop listening to you whenever you talk about why you like shopping for boots? How long would it be before you stopped talking to me?"

At the climax of the book, Klosterman has "a moment" with a 13-year-old girl at his motel. This should have triggered an Amber Alert, especially when he tells her, "I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not your enemy." He claims to turn down her request to share his pot, but admits after they part, "I can hear three teenagers groan through the wooden door. They are so not going to party" At the end of the chapter, he confesses, "I feel like a five-year-old who's pretending that he's afraid of the dark."

Reading this, one is amazed that there isn't a court order forcing Klosterman to wear an electronic bracelet. Or that he hasn't been castrated as a preventative measure. Or has he?

This Jacko-esque side to Klosterman's literary personality was a source of sick amusement when reviewing his last book, but this time around, I see the insidious rationale. The idea is to come off as waifish and harmless in order to promote a more sinister agenda. But somewhere in the Freudian translation, the message sometimes gets confusing, and, well, it gets pretty disturbing.

Klosterman at times seems so sexually contradictory that it's as though he double-transes his trans-gender voice back to an imitation of reified masculinity. He drinks a lot of beer, listens to a lot of rock, and even gets into a fight:

"My Nemesiswho was probably my closest friend at the timeused this irrelevant alternative publication as a vehicle to publicly attack me. It prompted me to drive back to Grand Forks, drink about 27 beers, and punch him in the face in front of all of our friends."

A hick in a North Dakota bar tells him, "You might be the type who'd go home and get a shotgun if I pissed you off." And he claims he drives 100 m.p.h.

He's also a former high school football and basketball star, and he's always got chicks crawling all over himeven though, by his own admission, scenes like, "I kiss her neck for maybe 15 minutes, and she falls asleep halfway through," repeat over and over.

I don't think Klosterman is unaware of what he's doing anymore. In fact, I think the sneaky bastard knows exactly what he's up to. It's an intentional strategy designed to blur and blandify everythingeven sex. Take his dust jacket photo. If two years ago Klosterman face looked like a saggy middle-aged ass, now he's morphing into an Austin Powers-lookalike dressed up as Andy Warhol with a cheap Butters wig thrown on top. The pastiche is consistent with his overall schtick. Wearing a tough black T-shirt, Klosterman's doughy arms are folded like a foreman's, yet he drops his left shoulder into a dramatic sag, as if to say, "I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not your enemy."

Against this blur and sag stand two of the book's villains: Sid Vicious, whom he dismisses in the first pages, and Kurt Cobain, whose tragedy is a direct challenge to the Klosterman Nation ethos. So he dismisses Cobain's death, though by way of attacking his sympathizers, since the memory is too alive to dismiss as easily as does Sid: "[Cobain's] death became a catchall event for anyone who wanted their adolescence to have depth: It was now possible to achieve credibility simply by mourning retrospectively." That's it: that's how he interprets the significance of Cobain's death and the profound sympathy it engendered.

In the Beige New World, there is no room for ideological wavering of the sort that Cobain's suicide inspired. Klosterchucks, as they will be called by tomorrow's Chinese archeologists, are biological blurs, drained of anything surprising, capable of little more than whining about relationships and debating what's cool and what isn't cool, always making sure to let each other know that the stakes are low to nil. Postmodernism is snarky self-analysis rather than a leap into intellectual and moral chaos. Adults are just like children and children are so cool, they're just like the adults who are like children. Memories only exist to plug into your Clueless voice-over. Time is totally weird. Death is totally overrated. Emotional pain is lame. And the South is cool.

Everywhere the book plugs the same cheap right-wing populism you can pick up from any FoxNews prick, couched in Klosterman's cute Valley Guy rhetoric. Not only is the South "awesome," but Cracker Barrel is "sublime," Olive Garden "is good," Henry Kissinger is "interesting," and "Christian cinema might be a completely untapped bastion of profound originalitythese folks are really, really 'thinking outside the box.'"

He loves the "real" America: "The South doesn't want to co-opt anything. They like who they are." But he hates them big city elitists. "You don't have to be away from Manhattan for very long to remember why everyone else in America hates New York," he says, failing to mention that Manhattan allowed him to escape a life in North Dakota faking like he's a beerswilling redneck, and instead allowed him to be the Little Man's Art Fag that he's become. And thanks to hateful Manhattan, he can walk around town with those glasses on and not have to worry about a pick-up truck of "awesome" homophobes bashing him with baseball bats as he heads to the bank to cash another royalty check.

Like all good reactionary populists, Chuck really hates shallow, fake coastal elitesnot so much because they're shallow, but because they're stupid. "I'm shocked by anyone who doesn't consider Los Angeles to be anything less than a bozo-saturated hellholeIt shocks me that the Los Angeles Times has a circulation of 1.3 million; I have yet to hear anyone in California ever mention current events in any context whatsoeverI don't care if 85 percent of Los Angeles is stupid."

Readers might be surprised by the sheer laziness of his attack on L.A., but its very banality is the point. He's not trying to be original. Only high-falutin' folks, or Frenchmen, do that. L.A. is stupid because it's stupid. The South is "real" because "they like who they are." Some folks are good, and some folks are just plain bad.

The sinister purpose of this book's seemingly harmless, seemingly insignificant, 230 pages now becomes clear. The rhetorical surface is a deception masking an all-too-familiar design: to co-opt another huge demographic into the Right's camp, soaking up all the 20- and 30-somethings not already zombified by Evangelism.

And they're buying it. The book's near the top of the New York Times bestseller list. That's why it's really hard for me to feel sad. Klosterman is a reflection of the most grotesque, ill-thought-out urges in America, urges that manifest themselves in different masks with each generation, but always with the same result: a nation of hopeless fools. I like to imagine a Chinese future, because I like to think that blaring stupidity gets punished, and patient, quiet prudence pays off. But the sad truth is that this country will continue to be slowly, incrementally Klosterchucked, and it won't really matter, because the kind of people who get worked up about this sort of thing are just trying to be cool and anti-. Sort of like all those antiIraq War people. Can't they find something else to do with their time? Like, you know, sorting out their 80s CD collection. That should be worth a one-liner at the next boot-shopping spree with Lenore and Diane, dontcha think?