The following was published in issue #48 of The American Dissident. Part 1 was published in issue #47, as was the cartoon below.
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A Dialogue de sourds with an Armchair Anarchist
Part II
Many have been inclined to kill the messenger by character assassination: they say he is a womanizer, he is bitter, he was unsuccessfully analyzed, he is disloyal, he is even, in the words of one accuser, ''dangerously mentally ill.'' Mr. Masson himself wonders whether it was ''possible that the analysts could not hear my 'message' because the messenger was so obnoxious.'' But to those in power, all whistle-blowers, dissenters and boat-rockers are obnoxious, at least while they remain lone rebels. One protester is crazy, two are a conspiracy and three are a movement.
— Carol Tavris, social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles
s a critical writer and thinker, I make an effort to avoid ad hominem. Now and then, however, when someone blasts me with insults, usually via psychological projection, I’ll slip and blast back with the same crap, although always after I’ve attacked the message via facts and reason. In essence, to kill the messenger via ad hominem is a very common ploy today, conscious or not, in an effort to divert attention away from the message. Politics stands as a pitiful example of that. It is also a tactic used when one is incapable of responding with a factual, logical retort to the messenger’s message.
After a lengthy nine-month or more back and forth almost on a daily basis with self-proclaimed anarchist, Alex Buchanan, I decided to terminate the dialogue de sourds, for it had become a waste of time. Evidently, anarchy was an ideology. Reason and facts are ineluctably the prime enemies of ideologues. And so I wrote:
BTW, I am not pissed off in the least. It's quite simply that you and I hold completely different viewpoints... and that we've essentially expressed them... and that the discussion is now going nowhere... but into the cesspool of childish name-calling. So, I simply suggest terminating the "discussion." I've got better things to do... and hopefully you do too.
nd of course Buchanan responded in an endlessly long email, which was his usual m.o., so I simply wrote without reading the whole thing: “Pipedream away… A world without hierarchies is certainly a pipedream.” I let him have the last word, which he did in a single sentence.
At least I float above the delusional sea of reactionary nihilism.
But then, I couldn’t resist and responded: Not quite sure how death is somehow a delusion. In any case, I don’t really abide by a particular ideology, unless belief in reality like inevitable death somehow constitutes one. In that reality, when I die, I won’t give a damn about anything or anyone. And in that sense, how not to be a cynic, for cynicism is reality. Also, I suppose I am a reactionary because I am against in-lockstep groupthink socialism/communism and the metastasizing of Marxist DEI/CRT ideology today in all spheres of society including the press, literature, and education… and the consequent racism obsession, chaotic, uh anarchic, open borders and resultant increase in crime, drugs, sex trafficking, and unfettered government spending, absence of accountability, and war-all-the-time. How that somehow makes me “delusional” is a quandary. And so Buchanan wrote yet again.
A space of perennial negativity becomes exhausting, because nothing can be created or affirmed there. I wrote that yesterday. As well as this, which was in my journal: Slone’s cruelty has resulted in more creativity than probably would have been standard. I can at least give him that.
How not to respond to the “cruelty” remark… and so I did.
As I reflect, your “Slone’s cruelty” remark is indeed extraordinary. To label all of my life’s “work” of anti-establishment criticism—hundreds of pages of essays, poems, and cartoons—as “cruelty” even outdoes the insults I’ve received over the decades from other artiste and poet cogs of the establishment, be they socialist, communist, capitalist, reactionary, or anarchist.
And with your fine art of incomprehensible “density,” as you labeled it, I’m sure you’ll somehow weasel around the remark…
To dismiss a critic like me as “cruel” is a clear indication of your true anarchist hatred for freedom of speech, the very cornerstone of democracy—obviously NOT of anarchy. Murder, torture, rape, etc. are “cruel.” Exercise of freedom of speech is NOT “cruel,” unless of course one is a left-wing snowflake who hates the message of the speaker.
ell, I guess I “cruelly” rejected his masterpiece essay (see last issue for a few examples from it! LOL! And, man, he really does constantly employ psychological projection! “Berserk”? Projection 101! And so, the anarchist weaseled around the remark.
My remark that you're cruel has only to do with your personality, not your "life's work." It's odd to see you even refer to what you do as "work." Who has validated it as such? By the way, your definition of "anti-establishment" is incoherent, big surprise. This is because your definition seems to demonstrate that all "the establishment" is in your head is any entity which is not you. Far from being anti-establishment, that is nihilistic solipsism. Moreover, by no metric whatsoever can you say that anarchists are the establishment. As for merely myself, I'm the furthest possible distance from the establishment as one could get. In my writing, I didn't dismiss you as cruel.
And so, I was left wondering how Buchanan knows me so well that he can conclude that my “personality” is so “cruel.” Hell, I never even met the guy! Aberrantly, he ended with yet another ad hominem.
Against your bourgeois masochism,
This anarchist who believes in egalitarian freedom
And so I responded.
You, clearly, are bourgeois! If you weren't, then you'd be working in a factory, painting houses, picking grapes, or shipyard welding like I once did. Instead, you sit and write. How much more bourgeois can one get? You want to get paid for your writing; I do not want to get paid for mine. So, who is really the bourgeois writer? Again, you project!!! Projection is your m.o..
Your idols were/are "bourgeois" including Marx, Chomsky, Bernie, Che (bourgeois medical doctor), and on and on. Weasel out of that reality! And, how the hell am I a “masochist’?
Well, he didn’t respond…
