Book Report

Here's a book review I just wrote for Evan Wright's new book. I shared a house with Evan (and a couple of other guys) the second semester of senior year at Vassar. We lost touch a while ago. He was very mild mannered and easy going, he unnerved the hell out of me by spending the whole of exam week planted on the couch watching television when everybody was freaking out and cramming. I doubt he even left the couch to take any exams, it was that bad. I took the picture above in the fall, during our disasterous stay on Long Island. When I took the picture it made me think of the Clash song "Safe European Home," even though it was an American home and it made we wonder what people were doing at that very moment in some of those small hamlets I'd visited deep in the Brazilian Amazon and I thought about how vast a world we lived in. Looking back at the photo it also says "Hella America" to me. Here's my unedited review of "Hella Nation":

¶ The September 11 attacks left more than a few Americans shocked to discover the depth of anti-U.S. hatred that exists in some corners of the world. Many of these same Americans would also probably have been shocked to learn life in these far-flung places bears little resemblance to the modern day U.S.A. with all the conveniences they have come to take for granted.
¶ That point is effectively driven home in the first chapter of Evan Wright's "Hella Nation," where US army troops stationed in Afghanistan are easily conned by an Afghan translator into believing the former-Taliban stronghold of Kandahar with its "medieval bazaars and dirt roads clogged with donkeys and chickens" also has a McDonald's of its own. One soldier, pining for someone to make a chow run, shouts out, "Get me Supersize everything."
¶ "Hella Nation" _ a collection of 12 previously published magazine articles written for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and LA Weekly among others _ is filled with details like this, painting a comically macabre portrait of present day America with a clear and sober eye.
¶ Wright made his name with his first book, 2004's "Generation Kill," chronicling his time with the United States Marine Corps as an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone. That book has been adapted into an HBO miniseries, complete with a character standing in for the author. Not bad for someone who got his start reviewing adult movies for Hustler magazine. "Hella Nation" is essentially the story of his unlikely road to success.
¶ Most of this information is in the newly-penned autobiographic introduction, but the stories that follow serve to flesh out his character and fill us in on his career path. In the book, Wright's father praises his son's promotion to Rolling Stone's unofficial ambassador to America's underbelly as being "one step up from ambassador to the crotch." It's a mere question of degrees, but the difference is an important one.
¶ Wright traces his success back to the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California that provided magazines like Hustler a loophole that allowed them to avoid obscenity charges, provided they publish at least one article a month that aspired to serious value. This requirement gave Wright his chance to shine after publisher Larry Flynt _ who believed white supremacists were behind the 1978 shooting that left him paralyzed _ gave him a break from reviewing porn movies and assigned him an article about the Aryan Nations _ included in the book.
¶ The other factor to which Wright attributes his success is Alcoholics Anonymous.
¶ Wright's work _ which has taken him from desert war zones to forest canopies in the company of eco-anarchists and into homes of HIV positive porn starlets _ have been likened to the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
¶ It's a comparison Wright rejects.
¶ He claims his reporting differs from Thompson's in that it is more about the subject than it is about the reporter. But that's a difficult argument to make when Wright's stories find him in such odd positions as wistfully regretting not holding the hand of crying porn star Jasmin St. Claire as she prepares to blow flames out of her rectum or driving around with anarchists preparing to vandalize symbols of corporate America.
¶ This is not a bad thing, since his stories are more interesting when makes an appearance. Portraits of ultimate fighter Tito Ortiz and the rock group Motley Crue are good, but don't rise too much above standard magazine fare. His article, "Scenes from My Life in Porn," originally published in the LA Weekly, is by contrast a near masterpiece and his portrait of Pat Dollard, who abandoned a successful career as a Hollywood agent to produce pro-war films in Iraq, verges on the epic.
¶ Wright may have even created his own genre of reporting: "Hella Journalism," which rather than viewing the world through a cascade of drugs and alcohol, applies the prism of a 12-step program to a society that has thoroughly assimilated Thompson's gozno excess.
¶ Here, for example, is Wright describing conservative commentator Ann Coulter asking Dollard to blow cigarette smoke in her face at their first meeting: "She leans her oblong, Brazil-nut-shaped face toward Dollard's lips, and he exhales through his yellow, cracked teeth. Coulter, who later explains she recently quit smoking and is still jonesing for tobacco, shuts her eyes and coos, 'Thank you.'" In short, the terminology of addiction and the lack of repugnance at the yellow, cracked teeth have all become acceptable part of the national discourse in the quest for a legal high.
¶ Although some of the stories predate the Bush years, the book comes together as a powerful portrait of America during that time. Many of the characters who inhabit Wright's landscape can be boiled down into some form of con man or prostitute, who in this era rife with reality TV and toxic mortgages, in many ways have come to stand in as our new American idols.