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| "Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?" |
by Andy Nowicki
Patrick Bateman is a now legendary anti-hero, first depicted
in Bret Easton Ellis’s excruciatingly hilarious and bleakly horrifying 1990 novel
American Psycho, and brought to the screen a decade later in a career-making performance by Christian Bale. Unlike
Bale’s more famous later cinematic incarnation, Bateman is no “dark knight,”
but rather a deeply vain, vapid, and vacuous man with a killer smile, who also happens
to be a serial killer.
Behind Bateman’s tailored designer suits lurks the
murderously muscular frame of a sadistic psycho who butchers fellow humans for
sport. But Bateman’s indulgences in
ultraviolence aren’t nearly as disconcerting as the fact that within him there
beats no “heart of darkness.” Instead,
this dapper dimbulb appears to have no heart at all, and seemingly no mind,
either. Soulless as a handsome storefront mannequin, Bateman is the sort of man
who launches into expansive monologues about the musical genius of Phil Collins,
Huey Lewis, and Whitney Houston, all the while abusing high-class whores in
various unspeakable ways… His tortures and murders, however, are interspersed
with moments of pure, inspired inanity. After ejaculating into the mouth of a
freshly-dead woman whose head he’s removed with a chainsaw, he frets over the
fact that his co-workers’ business cards are snazzier-looking than his; later, as
he prepares to bludgeon a homeless man to death in an alley, he ponders what suit
he ought to wear to an upcoming office party. Bateman lives for little more
than status, and his motivation to kill stems less from rage and passion, and more
from general disdain of those he considers to be beneath him.
*************
Today, among the diverse “alternative right” crowd, we find
a certain contingent which seems to emulate Patrick Bateman’s overall philosophy
and aesthetic outlook. What is Bateman, after all, if not a dumbed-down
Nietzschian, who asserts his “will to power” and detests “slave morality”? Who
is this photogenically brain-dead plunderer of life but a sort of reverse-Robin
Hood, vampiric “Skeksi,” remorselessly draining
the essence of the repulsive “proles” to enrich his own vitality: an
unrepentant Himmler-esque eugenicist who aims to root out “life unworthy of life” to assure the longevity of the master race’s rule?
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| The Skeksis were no plebs, that's for sure! |
We see the values of the “Patrick Bateman” faction of the
alt-right amply articulated in a recent Radix
article by Paul Treitschke entitled “The Beautiful People.” Writing of the
recent hubbub over comely ESPN reporterette Britt McHenry’s harsh dressing-down of a significantly less attractive low-level clerk of a towing company—over
the course of which the shapely sideline girl taunts the hapless,
huskily-built office drone for being ugly and for having a crappy job, among
other things (the entirety of the rant was caught on tape, and resulted in
McHenry receiving a one-week suspension from her job)—Treitschke comes out
decidedly in favor of the hot, bitchy TV star over the un-hot, non-glamorous
nobody whom she abused and humiliated.
Treitschke does not merely defend Miss McHenry in the manner
that some other commentators have—by noting that she was undoubtedly frustrated
with having her car towed for seemingly no good reason, and furthermore
observing that the video footage of McHenry has, after all, been edited in such
a manner that we don’t know what her interlocutor might have said to set her
off on her nasty tirade. Nor is Treitschke content to point out the undeniable
fact that many are inclined to hate on McHenry merely out of envy, because they
resent her for being rich, pretty, and popular; a prototype (for women) of the
girl they wish they were but can never be; or conversely (for men) of the sort
of girl who’d never sleep with them in a million years, and wouldn’t hesitate
to let them know of this fact.
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| Britt McHenry |
No, our intrepidly edgy correspondent goes still further.
McHenry is slim and attractive and the other woman is plump and homely; ergo—thus speaks Zara-Treitschke!—the
former is an Uberfraulein worthy of adulation and worship while the
latter is a contemptible “low-life” fit to be bullied by that same resplendent Uberfraulein who is, after all, her genetic and social better. To buttress this assertion, Treitschke tendentiously claims that:
Most ugly people are also ugly on the inside, and, in many ways, physical features are a reflection of lifestyle, personality, and character. Being a blonde bombshell says that person is healthy, positive, and makes good life decisions. On the other hand, being a fat ass reflects low willpower, low impulse control, and poor life decisions. The whole purpose of “inner beauty” is to subvert our ideas of real beauty and to comfort the dregs. It only exists deep in the minds of resentful pests and is a classic example of Nietzsche’s priestly morality at work.
Treitschke never explains just how he arrives at the calculation that “most
ugly people are also ugly on the inside,” or why possession of physical beauty
is an indication that one has made “good life decisions” or can otherwise be
said to reflect well upon one’s “character.” But it’s just as well for him not
to elaborate on these assertions, because one gets the impression that they are
less carefully constructed arguments than statements expressing his devoutly-held
first principles. The beautiful, strong, rich, famous, and haughty are simply,
to his mind, good; the ugly, weak,
poor nobodies are just plain bad.
This is a matter “beyond good and evil,” as that gaudily-mustachioed horse-loving head case first wrote (with, one gathers shaky hand) more than a century ago.
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Most representatives of the “Patrick Bateman” faction of the
alt-right don’t apply their criteria quite so crudely as Treitschke does in
this spectacularly silly piece. Still, they are generally fueled by an
aristocratic haughtiness, a “disdain for plebs.” One wonders, then, about their
stance against the principalities and powers of our age. Why oppose power when
power is strength and strength is inherently good?
In particular, given the realities of disproportionate
Jewish power in our world, what sense does it make to embrace anti-Semitism, as
the majority of the Bateman faction clearly do? If the Jews are in control, and
the rest of us are goyishe “plebs” working for our hebe masters, then isn’t it
a sign of a contemptible “slave morality” to want to throw off this yoke? Ought
we not simply to sit by and allow ourselves to be ridiculed and abused by our “natural”
rulers, who, according to writers like Treitschke, have every right to treat us
however they see fit? Are we not rendering ourselves mere “resentful pests” for
presuming to overturn the hierarchy that puts the Jews at the top? If we
complain, aren’t we just like the “fat ass” lady who had the effrontery to
object to being treated by Britt McHenry as the inferior she so clearly was?
Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. He occasionally updates his blog when the spirit moves him to do so. Visit his Soundcloud page.
Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. He occasionally updates his blog when the spirit moves him to do so. Visit his Soundcloud page.
