Vietnam

I am Private Donald R. Garland from Bakersfield, California, as nice a place to grow up in as you can imagine—good folk, and California was booming. My mother used to put sour cherry pies out on the lower edge of the Dutch door, just the way they cool down pies in cartoons, and it was pleasant that way. Please call me Don. On August 5, 1968, I was on an unarmed film reconnaissance mission of rivers in the Bong Son region, and I was killed when my Huey Cobra’s pilot got shot by a sniper from I don’t know where. The rear blade snagged the remains of a napalmed tree, and the tail boom severed. It took maybe seven seconds in all. The last thing I saw was an orange explosion approaching my face like lava flying down a Hawaiian slope.

I’m thinking about what I just said and how Nam it sounded. That was the thing about Nam. Everything about it was so alien that all you had to do was say a few place names with a few military flourishes and boom! It was like I was describing life on Mars, not something real that was actually happening to me, and closer to my parent’s house than, say, Vienna or Sweden. For people back in Bakersfield, reading about Nam was . . . I don’t know . . . like forcing them at gunpoint to read a Chinese menu closely, and no matter what you asked for, all they’d bring you was machine guns and dog soup.

My death in Bong Son was expensive. Aside from the costs of raising an American child born in 1949, there were the added costs of my attending San Diego Military Academy—it probably set my old man back thirty grand—plus all the US government money it cost to start a war overseas and then pay to fly me over, peel my potatoes, wash my laundry, buy me weapons, and put me in helicopters with pilots like my pal Len Bailor, taking off in a Huey filled with canisters of film that were to have been processed and shown on CBS TV. Len always got off on that—maybe our footage would be shown right before Red Skelton or Bewitched. It cost the Vietnamese way less money to send one of their nineteen-year-olds to war. The math’s not hard: grow up on a rice paddy, get a Soviet-made AK-47 (for free) and bingo, it’s wartime. That’s what Len called asymmetrical warfare.

I often wonder if someone in Washington looked at the cost of sending over people like me and said, “You know what, this is not sound Keynesian economics. We put too much money into raising this guy in—where? Bakersfield, California?—sounds too expensive already. His mama probably put out pies to cool on a window ledge—just so he can end up dying in a fucking Huey Cobra crash? And how much does one of those things cost? How did someone that expensive end up in the shit? This is nuts. Don’t we have cheaper people we can send off to that godforsaken shithole? Isn’t that the reason we allowed Mississippi to be part of the country? . . . Where’s Lyndon?”

“In his office, watching TV.”

“He is not watching TV. He is watching TVs. All three TV networks at once. He’s paranoid. He’s gaga.”

The moment I landed in Nam I knew there was no way we’d win the war over there. Sure, we had all these Hueys and fighter jets and shit, and Ann-Margret came and performed for the USO in Danang in ’66 and ’68, but we had expensive people like me playing with big, expensive toys that would never stand a chance against inexpensive—basically cost-free—gook soldiers playing with lots of essentially free Commie toys. It’s some sort of historical law. David and Goliath? Plus we were always getting crabs and syph, DEET burns, blister beetle scabs, and foot rot and ringworm . . . It was unholy.

God, I was homesick in Nam. Nothing was familiar and everything stank, and man, those latrines with ventilation provided by Satan! I was grateful for the orders and discipline—otherwise I’d have cried all day. I always wanted to be on potato-peeling duty, except I went to a military academy, so they’d never have me doing that kind of chore. I’d have liked to be peeling potatoes because at least a potato’s a potato and you know what it is and that it comes from the northern hemisphere. Potatoes don’t have shuddering diesel engines that stink in your face, making sleep impossible, and potatoes aren’t yokels with teeth that look like handfuls of dice randomly stuck into gums inside heads with the intelligence quotient of Popeye cartoons . . . but I’m just being mean.

We were all just babies over there. We shouldn’t have been there. It was stupid. We all knew it. April 1968: 48,000 men drafted and 537,000 troops in Nam. Those pansies burning their draft cards in New York City were totally right to do so, even if they did suck dick. I don’t think I met even one person in Nam who thought we were going to win someday. We all knew we were fucked. Maybe Ann-Margret thought we’d win. We just didn’t want to get killed . . . but then, obviously, I got killed, so . . . just more proof us boys were right.

I’d like to talk to Mr. Washington General Guy someday . . . but time no longer exists for me, so what’s a day? I’d ask, “Sir, why did you think it was a good idea?”

“Who said any of this was a good idea? How old are you, boy? Let me see—Private Garland?”

“Call me Don. I was a month shy of nineteen when I was killed.”

“Boo hoo, Don.”

“Sir?”

“Nam was obviously a total fucking disaster. There, are you satisfied?”

“But wait—how long did you know it was a total fucking disaster, sir?”

“Christ. Right out of the gate. If you want, I can go through my Day-timer and find the magic moment when it dawned on me that it was all a colossal goatfuck.”

“Actually, yes, sir. Could you, please?”

“Here it is: a telex from March 7, 1966. Mr. Bob Hope demands that he and Miss Margret be provided with Sealy Posturepedic mattresses with custom-molded foam pillows for her impending visit.”

“And?”

“That’s all. I read that specific telex, Don, and something inside me died. I don’t think Ann-Margret even knew the Nam reality. The reality was that Bob Hope had been in Nam before and he knew what a cosmic shithole that place really was, and he buckled at the thought of Ann-Margret witnessing the whole truth, because if she knew, then that would show in her performances. And then the troops would get spooked, and it would have just put the doom on fast-forward.”

“But me . . . and all the other guys like me who got killed.”

“You were cannon fodder. What else do you want me to say?”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t play dumb. You and all the other guys—and women too, for that matter, goddamn dykes mostly—just cannon fodder. This somehow surprises you, Mr. Military Academy Graduate?”

“Tell me more.”

“This is getting tiring. The thing about males from about seventeen to twenty-two is that nature rigs your brains—don’t ask me how—so that you’re susceptible to even the stupidest fucking ideas, whatever they may be. And you’re out there carrying a rifle or a scimitar or—fuck, I don’t know . . . If it’s not the war, maybe it’s just a bitter, fucked-up English teacher who wants to poison you by making you hate all the writers he or she hates—I used to study English, and I remember those teachers. They didn’t care about what was good or bad—they just wanted to poison young brains. And that was just English classes. It wasn’t even something as visceral as putting dumbfuck rich boys from Bakersfield, California, out in some godforsaken toe-rot shithole like Bong Son to die useless, overfunded deaths.”

“I see.”

“Don, when was the last time you saw a guy in his thirties ditch his family and run off to certain death in some goatfuck war? Never. It’s a brain thing. Males from seventeen to twenty-two are genetically fucked. They’ll do anything for anybody and they’ll think it’s the right thing. They have no sense of risk assessment.”

“That’s kind of cynical.”

“Brother, young dumbos like you have been going off to war to fight for crazy batshit stuff since the dawn of man. Makes me embarrassed to be human sometimes.”

“Thank you for your candour, sir.”

“You’re welcome, Don.”

You maybe think I must be angry for having been sent off so cynically to die in a pointless war with no clear good guys or bad guys, where young men were turned into zombies and ghouls and where everything good in the world was covered with a mixture of gasoline and Styrofoam pellets and then set alight.

But what you don’t know is that I went to a museum once, in Toronto, Canada, in—1965?—and it was summer and my parents were arguing and my brothers were being a real pain, and I simply walked away from them, walked up echoey travertine stairs to another floor, into the rooms where they kept the displays of taxidermied life on Earth, and it changed the way I thought. Walking through those chambers didn’t feel like a boring school field trip: it was the most wondrous trip ever. I looked inside the glass display cases and they had an Alaska king crab with red prickly legs longer than my daddy’s arms, and there was a skeleton of a triceratops, and there was an extinct passenger pigeon, and a fungus that secreted a red blob shaped like a soccer ball. And there were foxes and butterflies and deep-sea creatures with little dangling light things in front of their mouths, and there was a clamshell the size of my car’s trunk and . . . I just looked at all of this life. So much life. Life in every shape and form and size, and I just stood there and thought, Here it is. I’m alive, just as everything here in these cases was once alive. So what is it, then, this thing called life? This thing called life that I share with all these creatures here.

My parents were furious when they found me. I’d been gone an hour and we still had to visit some kind of castle thing a few miles away. But I didn’t care if they were mad, because I had been shown a small window in time. And I knew I’d been given something precious in my just sixteen years on this planet, a chance to share the Earth with those other creatures. It kept me going when I was in the shit.

I thought, I could be a Butterfly fish off the Australian coast.

I thought, I could be a leopard in a Kenyan tree, waiting to pounce on prey below.

I thought, I could be one of those stray dogs who loiter outside the mess tent.

I—you—we—anyone could be a coral reef, a cuttlefish, a gust of pollen or a bright yellow mantis longer than my foot. I was alive!

My name was Don—Donald Garland—and now I’m gone, and I miss you, Earth. I really miss you dearly.

Black Goo

The first time I ever visited a McDonald’s restaurant was on a rainy Saturday afternoon, November 6, 1971. It was Bruce Lemke’s tenth birthday party and the McDonald’s was at the corner of Pemberton Avenue and Marine Drive in North Vancouver, BC. The reason I can pinpoint this date is that it was also the date and time of the Cannikin nuclear test on Amchitka Island—a Spartan missile warhead of between four and five megatons was detonated at the bottom of a 1.5-mile vertical shaft drilled into the Alaskan island. The press had made an enormous to-do over the blast, as it was roughly four times more powerful than any previous underground detonation. According to the fears of the day, the blast was to occur on seismic faults connected to Vancouver, catalyzing chain reactions that in turn would trigger the great granddaddy of all earthquakes. The Park Royal shopping centre would break into two and breathe fire; the Cleveland Dam up the Capilano River would shatter, drowning whoever survived in the mall three miles below. The cantilevered L-shaped modern houses with their “Kitchens of Tomorrow” perched on the slopes overlooking the city would crumble like so much litter—all to be washed away by a tsunami six hours later.

I wrote the above paragraph in 1992, twenty years after that trip to McDonald’s, and no, the world didn’t end. It never does. Looking back on the nuclear paranoia and fear that defined the emotional texture of the Cold War—not just for me, but for much of the world’s population—I see now that the nuclear threat was a bogeyman constructed largely to terrify citizens into okaying massive defence budgets without debate. Fear sells.

There’s nothing like the fears you acquire between the ages of, say, ten to fourteen. They seem to go in the deepest and colour your world the most strongly. A common question I ask people whenever film discussions come up is, “What is the movie that scared the shit out of you when you were eleven or twelve—the film that you were probably too young to watch, but you watched it anyway, and it totally screwed you up for the rest of your life?” Everyone’s got one. Mine was Lord of the Flies, but other common answers are The Exorcist and Event Horizon. The point is that we all know that magic window in time when one is most susceptible to fear.

In the early hours of Tuesday, September 25, 1973, two freighters, the Sun Diamond and Erawan, collided at the entrance to Vancouver’s main harbour area, Burrard Inlet, dumping over fifty thousand gallons of bunker oil into the water. Bunker oil is the nastiest, stickiest, creepiest oil there is. In the oil distillation process, bunker oil is what sticks to the bottom of the tank. It’s like molten tar, brutally foul, jet black and, on a warm day, the consistency of magnetic black diarrhea. It sticks to everything and it doesn’t come off. An oil-soaked bird is a dead bird. They don’t live. They die. There’s no happy ending for any wildlife touched by the stuff. Don’t ever believe the photos experts show you.

On the afternoon of September 25, 1973, someone thought it would be a great idea for local school kids to come “help,” so a bunch of us went down to help “clean things up.”

It was a dreadful idea.

We were dropped off in the same parking lot you normally parked in to get to the beach in summer, except there were dark boot-prints everywhere, and you could see streaks on the lawn where people tried wiping bunker fuel oil from their shoes before getting back into their vehicles; litter and newspapers were used for the same purpose. I remember the bus driver saying they could get someone else to pick us up; he wasn’t getting any of that in his bus, and then he drove away.

It was confusion. Nobody really had any idea what to do. Well-intentioned people were using bamboo rakes to try to capture bunker fuel globules. You could see the blobs inside the waves as they lobbed in. Undead black zombie jellyfish. Nothing had prepared any of us eleven-year-olds for the foulness of bunker oil, the way it obliterates anything it touches, and its neutron-star black gloss as it smothers a low tide–scape of barnacles and starfish. It felt like a crime scene. It was a crime scene.

Someone gave us brand new rakes that had price stickers on them from the Woolco store in North Van. The government bought rakes from Woolco? They didn’t have actual proper cleanup tools on hand?

The government was seemingly no help at all, having no visible plan in place to deal with a spill like that, and its efforts were directly compared to Monty Python’s Flying Circus by The Vancouver Sun.

Someone shouted, “Go down to where the gravel meets the water and start raking. Try to catch the blobs before they break up,” and so that’s what we did. It was dismal, like trying to capture wheelbarrow-sized chunks of Jell-O with chopsticks. We saw, farther down the beach, that peat moss had been strewn onto gravel and sand to soak up the oil. Logs along the beach, we were told, acted as excellent bunker fuel sponges, and people would be gathering these logs to burn later in the day.

I remember a hippie with something black in his hands coming up to me and two friends: a cormorant completely covered in oil but still alive, and in heartbreaking death throes. “Look what you did.”

“Huh?”

“You people from the suburbs. You made this happen. You killed it with your consuming and pollution.”

That asshole destroyed any sympathy I might have one day had for hippies, but he made me love all birds and animals in a way I may never have otherwise. So thanks, asshole. And by the way, where did you grow up—in a manger?

In general, local environmentalists showed no pity for the citizens of North and West Vancouver, whose beaches, rocky coves and bays were blackened for miles once the tides began pushing the oil along. (Forty-two years later one can still clearly see oil stain marks on rocks ten miles up the coast.) The environmentalists argued that residents deserved retribution for all the crap the suburbanites were already putting in the harbour—an attitude as arrogant and useless as that of the government. People talk about the 1970s, but they never talk about how much hate there was back then. Hate and pollution. Everyone was looking for cheap, easy targets. Social ideas were evolving, but technologies to make new ideas fully manifest—as well as laws supporting the changes—were evolving much more slowly. Inside the lag time between the two realms lurked hate; everyone hating everything. Nobody looked clean. People still littered. Cars belched blue smoke that smelled like burning plastics. Don’t get too nostalgic; it wasn’t all plaid bell-bottoms and feathered hair.

After an hour it was obvious we were wasting our time. Two friends and I took a regular bus back to school, where we got a punitive lecture about bailing on community participation. It was 1973 and the fact that three kids had spent the day unsupervised as easy prey to molesters had never troubled anyone. Had we hitchhiked back to school, we probably would have gotten points for being resourceful.

That night I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t sleep well for a month, and I still sometimes can’t sleep when I think about the cormorant.

And don’t forget nuclear war was always one ICBM away. And then somewhere in there I saw Lord of the Flies.

The punchline is that not even a month later, in the early morning of October 24, 1973, a German freighter, the Westfalia, dumped almost nine hundred gallons of bunker oil in Vancouver’s main harbour, and by noon it had washed up on the shore of Vancouver’s crown jewel, Stanley Park. The Westfalia’s spill was a fraction of what had been dumped the previous month, but you have to add the 1970s everything’s-gone-to-shit factor: this smaller spill just reinforced the spirit of the age. Everything was disintegrating back then.

On April 8, 2015, 15,142 days after the Westfalia spill, a grain ship, the Marathassa, registered in Cyprus, leaked 528 gallons of bunker oil into Vancouver’s outer harbour area, English Bay. It was one-eighty-sixth the volume of what had been dumped on September 25, 1973. One would think oil spill cleanup in 2015 would be quick, forceful and inexpensive. Wrong. Federal and provincial politicians were about as functional and helpful as Peter, Chris, Stewie and Brian Griffin drinking ipecac together on Family Guy. Finger pointing on all sides. Blame. Retaliation. Lying. Downplaying. Catastrophizing. The one lesson that emerges from what was actually a comparatively small spill is that there still is no effective system in place to handle oil gone wrong, and this is in the centre of a city of 2.4 million people. I shudder to imagine a spill, even a small spill up or down the coast, away from both cleanup protocols and scrutiny.

In Vancouver right now, a company named Kinder Morgan wants to triple the amount of oil carried by the Trans Mountain pipeline and increase the number of oil tankers in Burrard Inlet from five to thirty-four per month. In preparation for (inevitable) future spills, the company “is committed to a polluter-pay, world-class, land-based and marine-spill response regime.” Who wouldn’t feel better already? I’m stoked!

Also, the BC government is trying to get liquefied natural gas (LNG) out of BC and down to Malaysia and, to do so, is hoping to get in bed with the Malaysian energy giant Petronas. The BC government has seemingly bet the family farm entirely on LNG going to Malaysia, complete with a fantasy number of 100,000 jobs to be created (in actuality, 4,500 during construction and up to 1,500 permanent jobs afterwards, spread around the province). One plant in particular is slated for the end of Howe Sound, North America’s southernmost fjord and a place of spectacular beauty that has only recently healed from the toxic and visual blight of both copper mining (closed 1971) and a pulp mill (closed 2006). The selling point in the nearby town of Squamish (which lost all those pulp and copper jobs) is, of course, jobs, jobs, jobs—even though the proposed job numbers are pie in the sky, and the facility is setting the region up for truly devastating disaster scenarios. As a bonus, an LNG plant will blight one of the most beautiful and beloved scenic tourism corridors in Canada. It will be a visual nightmare experienced by every single human being who drives from Vancouver up to Squamish, Whistler and beyond.

Everyone is trying to move energy everywhere—and probably close to where you live. If it’s not tankers and pipelines, then it’s oil by rail. Remember: when something goes horribly wrong (and it will; even they acknowledge that), it will be written off as a one-time-only human error kind of thing, but it will keep happening over and over. Yes, the world will continue to chug along, but it will be a stained and damaged world.

A wonderful expression comes to mind here, one about trees: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is right now.” This could equally apply to planning safe energy. Twenty years pass very quickly. Start digging now.

The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team

Sandra was sitting at her kitchen table looking out at a sunny day when her front doorbell rang. It was the police, come to tell her that her mother had been arrested for murdering the local Channel Three News Team—two anchorpeople and the weather guy and four studio technicians. Her mother, acting alone, had arrived at the TV studio carrying an oversized rattan handbag and pretended to be a sweet old thing interested in meeting the hostess from a cooking show. The moment she was close to the newsroom set, she asked to visit the washroom, slipped away, removed several guns from her handbag and came back firing. She was knocked to the ground by a surviving cameraman. Her pelvis was fractured and she was in hospital in stable condition. A clip of the event was going viral. The police asked Sandra if she would go to the hospital with them and she said of course, and off they drove, cherries flashing.

The main entryway was cordoned off, but the cruiser was allowed to slip past the security guards and news-crazed media. They elevatored up to the top floor, where a quartet of rifle-toting officers guarded her mother’s room. Sandra had always expected that one day she would visit her mother with a broken hip or something similar in the hospital, just not under the current set of circumstances.

“Mom?”

“Hello, dear.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m more than happy to tell you.”

“Wait—where’s Dad?”

“He’s not available right now.”

“Oh Jesus, he’s not going to go out and shoot somebody too, is he?”

“Aren’t you quick to jump to conclusions!”

“Mom, you killed seven people.”

“Good.”

Sandra tried to compose herself while her mother serenely smiled. “So, why’d you do it?” she finally managed to ask.

“Our New Vision church group had an enlightenment fasting up in the mountains last weekend. It was glorious. And during group prayer, I was lifted up above Earth, and when I looked down on this planet, it was black like a charcoal briquette. At that moment I realized that Earth is over, and that New Vision will take me to a new planet.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not kidding you, Sandra. Your father and I want you to join us.”

“Mom. This is awful. Wake up—wake up!”

Sandra’s mother looked at her with the same bland face she used when she thanked polite men for holding a door open for her. “You should be thrilled for me, dear. I believe it was you growing up who was fanatical about that escapist comic strip—what was it?—The Battleship Yamato? You of all people must understand what it feels like to want to leave a destroyed planet and roam the universe trying to fight an overwhelming darkness.”

“It was just a comic, Mom.”

“For ‘just a comic’ it certainly took hold of your imagination. I think you’re jealous of me, dear.”

“What? ”

“You’re jealous because right now I’m actually inside your comic book—on the other side of the mirror—and you aren’t. But you can be. Join us.”

“Mom, just stop it. Why did you kill those people?”

“I killed them because they were famous.”

“What? ”

“The only thing our diseased culture believes in is fame. No other form of eternity exists. Kill the famous and you snuff out the core of the diseased culture.”

“So you killed the Channel Three News Team? They’re barely famous even here in town.”

“If you watch the news right about now, you’ll see that New Visioneers around the world have shot and killed many people at all levels of fame. To decide who is more famous than anyone else is to buy into the fame creed. So we have been indiscriminate.”

Sandra’s sense of dread grew stronger. “So who is Dad going to kill?”

“What time is it?”

Sandra looked at her cellphone. “Almost five o’clock.”

“In that case, right about . . .” Sandra’s mother looked at the ceiling for a second, whereupon Sandra heard small cracking sounds coming from the hospital entranceway. “Right about now he’s just shot the news reporters covering my shootings.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .” Sandra ran to the window: pandemonium. She turned to her mother: “Holy fuck! What is wrong with you?”

“Is your father dead?”

“What?” Sandra looked out the window again and saw her father’s body sprawled on a berm covered in Kentucky bluegrass. “Yes. Mother of God, he is!”

“Good. He’ll be on the other side to greet me with the rest of us who have fulfilled our mission today.”

Sandra staggered out into the hallway, gasping, but police and hospital staff paid her little attention as they braced for the next wave of wounded, dying and dead. She shouted at them, as if they could understand, “I am so sorry for all of this!” but she was ignored.

On a nursing station’s TV screen, newscasts were coming in showing the faces of murdered celebrities from around the world.

Sandra ran back into the room to find her mother glowing. “Mom, you’re crazy. Your cult is crazy.”

“I want all of your generation to come join me and band together to smash all the shop windows of every boutique in the country, to set fire to every catwalk, to shoot rockets into Beverly Hills. It will be beautiful—like modern art—and people will finally stop believing in the false future promised by celebrity.”

Sandra wanted to vomit. Gurneys loaded with bodies shunted quickly past the room’s door and her mother went on talking: “In the last days of World War II, the Japanese emperor told the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, to die like smashed jewels. And so I say to you, Sandra, die like a smashed jewel. Destroy so that we can rebuild. We can become a furnace within a furnace.”

Outside it had grown dark—not regular darkness—a chemical darkness that felt linked to profound evil. The moon was full. Sandra and her mother caught each other staring at it at the same time. Her mother said, “I wish the Apollo astronauts had died on the moon.”

“What? ”

“Then it would be one great big tombstone for planet Earth.” Her mother popped something into her mouth.

“Mom—what was that?”

“Cyanide, dear. I’m off on your Battleship Yamato. Why don’t you come too?”

Sandra ran for help, but the staff were too busy with the wounded, and so she watched her mother die, writhing on her bed, then falling still.

Stunned, Sandra walked back out into the hallway. There was blood on the floor and blood on the walls. It was smeared, and the whole place smelled of hot, moist coins. She heard gunshots coming from the elevator bank, and screaming staff ran down the hallway past her. She saw an orderly in turquoise surgical scrubs coming toward her holding a sawed-off shotgun, and the look in his eye told Sandra that this was a New Vision follower.

He was whistling, and as he came nearer, he said, relaxed as can be, “Looks like you’re one pretty darn famous little lady now, aren’t you. Being daughter of a mass murderer and all.”

Sandra ran into her mother’s room and kissed her mother’s mouth violently, sucking in the remains of the cyanide. She tasted the chemical as it entered her bloodstream and knew death would be quick.

The whistling stopped as the orderly loomed in the doorway. Sandra said, “Know what? I leave this planet on my own terms, you freak.” She was dead before the buckshot pounded her chest.

Nine Readers

Last summer in Reykjavik, I learned that one in ten Icelanders will write a novel in their lifetime. This is impressive, but the downside of this is that each novel gets only nine readers. In a weird way, our world is turning into a world of Icelandic novelists, except substitute blog, vlog or website for novel—and there we are: in Reykjavik.

A defining sentiment of our new era is that never before has being an individual been so easily broadcast, yet never before has individuality felt so ever-increasingly far away. Before the twenty-first century, we lived with the notion of oneself as a noble citizen of the world, a lone soul whose life was a story written across a span of seven decades or so. We now live instead with the ever-gnawing sensation that one’s self is really just one more meat unit among seven billion other meat units.

This twenty-first century crisis of individuality expresses itself in many ways. In Japan there is the phenomenon of the hikikomori. Your child grows up, leaves home and then, after a few years, returns home and never leaves his or her bedroom again. Ever. The rare hikikomori will venture out in the middle of the night to visit a local mini-mart, but that’s it. In 2010 the Japanese government estimated there were 700,000 hikikomori in Japan, with the average age being thirty-one. Yes, you read that correctly: almost three-quarters of a million modern-day elective hermits back with Mom and Dad, and they are psychologically incapable of ever leaving.

Ever.

I suspect these young people are experiencing “atomophobia”: the fear of feeling like an individual. After the late-1980s bubble burst, Japan went from being a monolithically homogenized culture, with guaranteed lifetime employment, to its exact opposite: a land of hyper-individuality trapped inside a consumer hyperspace that guarantees nothing, let alone employment. The crazy costumes once worn only on Sundays in Harajuku are now regular, uncommented upon Japanese daywear. One might think that a culture in which its everyday citizens dress in borderline Halloween costumes is a culture of fierce individuality; instead it is a society deeply conflicted about the dark side of enforced uniqueness. “The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become,” wrote Australian critic Louise Adler. “This is most obvious in people whom society no longer keeps in line; the eccentricity of the very rich or of castaways.”

In North America and England we have the trend of normcore (the normal version of hardcore)—a trend so stupid that it’s more famous for being a stupid trend than it is for being a trend itself. But normcore actually is something real, a unisex trend that very much exists. England’s Heat magazine tells us, “Normcore celebrates the ordinary with its reliance on brazenly bland staples such as stonewashed denim, label-less shirts, and pool sandals that bear a distressing resemblance to Crocs. It’s the ultimate knee-jerk reaction to not only the meticulously dour Hipster look, but the demands of fashion in general.”fn1 Normcore is about dressing to be invisible, the fashion equivalent of renting a mid-size American-made sedan in a large American city: total anonymity that offers abdication from the responsibility of having to be an individual living in real time in the real world. Normcore says, “Screw it. Go ahead: monitor me on CCTVs. Scan the Internet with facial recognition algorithms. Have the NSA read my emails like tea leaves. I’m going to be deliberately un-unique. I am going to punish the world with my blandness, and if you scan my metadata, you’ll fall asleep before you find anything good.”

In the fall of 2014, driving in a taxi on Clerkenwell Road in London, I saw a huge Gap billboard that read: “BE NORMAL.”

Huh?