Cranks IV: The Fan Boy

 

            The crank, typically, writes in brutal prose and has all the personal charm of a rutting gnu. Why, then, do so many people revere the crank? The answer may in be in Milton. Beelzebub in Paradise Lost subordinates himself to Satan (HE will never be a rebel angel) as the easiest way of getting out from under God. This is the exact logic by which the fan boy kowtows to the crank or, indeed, by which the demos submits to a tyrant. This takes a bit of unpacking though perhaps not too much. The fan boy has an anxiety and, like so many anxieties in our world, it concerns the certification of personal narratives. These narratives involve the self, of course, but the self as situated in group narratives which often involve historical or literary or other claims. These are narratives that structure people’s lives in an immediate and satisfying way and THIS puts people at odds with potential counter narratives. Often these counter narratives come from specific elite settings like academia, where critical standards may put some or all of the cherished narrative in question. The problem here is that the outsiders to institutions like media or academia does not have access to the specialized knowledge or skill set to challenge these counter stories. Furthermore, they don’t KNOW any of the people in these institutions and thus do not know what their ‘real motives’ are. If we don’t know what someone’s motives are we assume they are bad. Whatever their agenda is it can mean nothing good for me. ‘They’ are salesmen who are ‘pushing something’ and the less I know about what this something is the more I distrust them. Plus, the society I live in often finds ways of privileging expert narratives over mine. I live UNDER a narrative I have not constructed and thus am prey to whatever forces these narratives conceal. Just as in days of old my life is determined by a priestly class of ‘specialists’ I am supposed to respect without understanding and trust though I have had no hand in the construction of their so-called knowledge. If I am being lectured at by people I don’t understand I am inclined to wonder if I am being duped by bullshitters pretending to know things they do not. The possibility that this COULD be the case, of course, quickly turns into the certainty that it is. 

                Into this anxious thought loop steps the crank with the Good News. The scholars ARE full of it! YOU are free from the dead hand of the smug, self certifying elites who have hitherto colonized your thinking and discourse! This comes, of course, at the cost of total submission to the will of the crank. The price of Beelzebub overcoming God is that he will be, for all eternity, Satan’s little bitch. This is a price he will happily pay just as the electorate will reward a demagogue with blind loyalty so long as he offers revenge against the hated elites. Trump voters will never turn on Trump for any reason anymore than it would ever occur to Beelzebub to rebel in turn against Satan (in spite of the precedent he set!). So, the crank gets a full pass as he is the underdog who frees us from the overdogs. That he becomes an overdog in his turn is a trivial matter compared to the liberation he offers. This is why acolytes buy his claims hook line and sinker and react with rage to any skepticism (even the slightest) that comes from an academic source. The crank is telling a better story and that is the story, the ‘real story’ the experts are knowingly suppressing. This of course, brings us back to politics. Historical narratives, especially triumphalist ones, are one area where the crank can thrive for here the academics refuse to give us what we want. They refuse to tell us a myth of national greatness. They refuse to tell us a narrative about the march of progress and the triumph of enlightenment reason and the overthrow of superstition. They refuse to tell a straightforward story in the style of a grand narrative. They hedge and qualify precisely where the public wants ringing affirmation. They refuse the simple schematic that makes history not only intelligible but attractive. They refuse to do what we pay them for. In this they offend, intrinsically, multiple ends of the political and cultural spectrum at once. They peddle bullshit by pettifogging like lawyers. THEY can prove anything they want and make the worse case seem the better. As in Aristophanes we must burn down the phrontisterion!