1 (the memoir)
The alt-right is dead. I think it’s fair to say that. The time of death may be put as early as the Charlottesville riot that led to the murder of Heather Heyer in August 2017. I had the dubious fortune of encountering a taxonomy of the young squires attracted by the movement’s ideas at a birthday gathering a year after. I’m stretching the definitions because I’m talking about Europe, and indeed the hinterland Europe left to deal with most of migration with results I think it’s fair to call historically disastrous. But at least the Reactionary Rambo who sparked outrage to own the libs is a strain facing immunity threshold everywhere, the far-right having largely folded into the mainstream as it’s wont to do, and if that process didn’t start with Heather it must have ended with Trump. At any rate we have bad reception over here, culturally speaking, and in Fall 2018 the death knell sound had yet to reach us. And things do keep on dying as they rot.
Hungary is my country of residence, where I migrated on an traineeship and ended up programming for Big Finance. It is Europe’s rightmost country, on the map and otherwise. At our narrative time its elected oligarchy and its platform of EU criticism and EU funds reign unchallenged, and even expat groups on Facebook reek with the stench of flaming garbage threads where work-hard play-hard types slam George Soros in B2 Level English. Sketchy accounts troll for the government like there is no tomorrow, and indeed there isn’t, because come tomorrow they no longer exist. Admins slap you with short-term bans for trolling back, then point at the no-politics rule.
Meanwhile, the nightlife is thronged with the globalized: assortments of locals and tourists, students and young professionals, them and us, all raiding the streets for cheap booze and sloppy thigh-grinds. Boatfuls of English entourages in themed t-shirts trot around grooms in wedding dresses, brides in sashes and tiaras among their attendant hens form processions of helium phalluses. Fights occasionally break out, and bouncers keep the peace or slam it. Welcome to Reactionland.
The Germans felt for resentment with us Greeks, the English endlessly apologized for the wreckage of empire while running all the meetups, the Hungarians took a stance apart from the government that brought us cheap Russian natural gas. But I guess what bugged me most was how eager people were to tell you how hard they work, or how little they spend, or make some other show of prudence. Creative types at alternative haunts toed a faint liberal line. But the underlying narrative was always a presumption of meritocracy and an unbroken circle of work-life-capital. We curbed the adulting at hippie dives with reclaimed furniture or glitzy social clubs with signature cocktails, our faces still looking strangely twentysomething, and asked each other how the economy was faring back home.
Then there was love. I had skipped the market for The Serious; for a guy, I was an odd duck. People behaved strangely around coupled guys. Preened, sort of. There was a curious interest that seemed to resurface at the expense of any other sphere of conversation. A feeling like a questionnaire was being filled. Like the smiling hid something. Like if you were to report the failure and end of love, the smiling wouldn’t go away, exactly. But they might. The smilers. Ꙭ Ꙭ
Dissatisfied, I was, and chronically. When I think of that night, I also think of the session I spent staring one thousand yards past my therapist, wondering where it all went wrong. I mean it’s not like people went on Erasmus to foster their internationalism. But then you’re down to wolfpacks looking sideways at Southerners and being Islamophobic. Why don’t we just assassinate someone important at Sarajevo and have another go at it?
That was the rant. Upon leaving I stood at the door and said something about the defeat of it all, about the failure of youth and future and my own uselessness. The therapist smiled big and held out for handshake, his eyes glowed Danube blue. “No.”
2 (the menagerie)
The first figure I meet is a lean Swede who pegs me for American (joke’s on him, I have loads of accent) and once thrown refers to his visit to my country with strange pauses. I’ve had previous run-ins with bad tourists so I get stereotype-threatened and remember the police who gave me shit at Öresundsbron because they didn’t like our shitty laminated national ID cards. I ask how he knows Birthday Boy: “We used to roll before he got married.” “You used to what?” “Go out. Before he got a girlfriend.”
The Swede smiles, nods, maintains eye contact, and a shadow of a smirk that tells me he’s a persistent flirt. His Facebook is well-liked, has him both in a tuxedo and making a joke about HRC going to prison that also tags Nelson Mandela. In the Reactionland taxonomy, I like to think of him as the Dandy or the Diplomat, because he even takes criticism in stride. When someone tells him that Merry Christmas in Swedish is Allahu Akbar, he adds concern to his nod and talks about shifting demographics and how people just don’t see it. Thoughfult pose, hand on chin. I get the sense there is a hierarchy of national uncuckedness being respected. The Diplomat learns Greek because he’s into the history.
The wit who would thus puncture him sits on the other end of the taxonomy, full of attack and looking for kicks: the Speedo. He’s properly tall and with the elusive V shape, smokes fast and sports an undercut. Shows up in ripped pants topped with unpressed white shirt and loose black tie, the theory being that if the girl isn’t into bad boys he can pull up the tie and tuck in the shirt.
“So there were these two girls we were trying to take home,” he begins, before a sidekick cuts him off hands on side abs and grin gratified: “Well, we did take them home.” Video evidence is presented wherein two females on a pavement suck face with abandon. For some reason, everybody laughs. The story continues that after procurement the females went on making out on the couch until the guys got bored making drinks and setting moods. Now that’s funny and I’m being authoritative here. The story begs to be told straight: a night of Sapphic bliss somehow leading to some clueless dudes’ smelly flat whose booze is drunk before they’re left on autopilot.
The Speedo displays a soft touch, later on. Something about his homeland being this magical place that’s tragically absent of normal people who go out at normal hours.
But the alt-right wouldn’t have flown without Charlatans. The assembly is dominated by a living bicep with metalhead looks who turns out to be one of those reverse Frenchmen; the guys who the Republic’s endless propensity for intellectual razzle-dazzle out of chic Psychoanalytic Marxism and reterritorializing it into differently chic neo-Fascist drivel. “What do you mean by far-right?” he asks the kid across the table, utterly polite for someone butting into someone else’s conversation. “Look at it this way”, he then explains, listing a few progressive causes ending with vegetarianism, “Who was for all that?”
The kid doesn’t know who was for all that. He doesn’t know how to smell a reverse ad Hitlerum. He yaps and yammers mocking the locally accented English with the knowing exasperation of a local who knows his unaccented and perfectly formed English sentences are fitting him into the expat crowd. His animation is more akin to a test-taker, sitting on nails, anxiety jagging up his voice. Later on he talks about how he feels rich in money but not in soul; that he can be good at anything but hasn’t quite figured out what should be his thing.
The kid doesn’t know what to do with the Charlatan’s reverse ad Hitlerum, but the Charlatan keeps dropping science at him, expounding by default, retreating only to reload more of the clichés and sophistries that still got under our skin in distant 2018, all the way down to the takeover of Star Wars. And each round the kid seems a little more convinced, the protests weaker, bafflement mixed with acquiescence. By the end he’s decided to stake a claim to his existence by jumping on his chair exclaiming flowery adjectives: “Disheartening!” (fingers clasped around beer glass) “Distressing!” The alt-right wouldn’t have flown either without people who were ideological Footballs; it’s the ballast to the hot air. The Football is even physically small. A self-fulfilling prophecy of macho scientism.
3 (the narrator)
Where am I in all this? There is a very young Uzbek finance whiz next to me who’s lived in Athens enough to laugh with me at the tanker quantities of coffee people there put in their mouths, but cultural exchange in expat discourse pivots and pirouettes and so the conversation inevitably reaches the Muslim prohibition on pork. “Actually, it’s probably about pork spoiling in the desert.” “Actually, it’s because the pig is the only animal that will eat its own young.” “Actually, cats do that too.”
The Uzbek later disappears and I’m left wondering if the friendly spar was really necessary or even appropriate, especially with the Charlatan radiating 4chan into the minority’s airspace. The kid had been there as someone’s roommate and probably acted out his awareness of the courtesy speaking with “fuckin’ this” and “fuckin’ that,” performing teen movie excitement as if it would ingratiate him. He probably went home to catch a 6AM call with some faraway timezone, secretly wishing he was drunk and unslept since at least that would have made a story. I kept busy infusing myself with left melancholy and that peculiar wasteland feeling we’re secretly into.
Inaction makes Footballs of us all. Got it. But letting a bouncer-philosopher flex at a lame birthday bash might actually work out in our favor. I mean the guy moved on to wild historical fanfic about how the Romans actually murdered the true Western civ of the Gauls and cracking that into the mainstream was his life’s work, apparently. By that point you get a shadow of a hope we as a culture know a charlatan when we see him naked at least, and having him explain his Horned God and Crusader King tattoos is basically petting a very large dog. Besides, you can only stretch Reactionland euronationalism so much. The Crusader King was a French-Hungarian figure symbolizing the Charlatan integrating into his country of residence. OK, fair enough. But when I was leaving he was trying to sell Birthday Boy’s girlfriend, a local who works in languages and lives with a Brazilian, on her own country’s nationalism, a space in which the Charlatan happens to know which is the right emerging fringe party and which one has Jews. It was farce, not tragedy, and a sign of how these ideological fads were imploding.
Holocaust history is too appalling to engage with for long, and one wonders if some people delude themselves that their highly proteinated musculature can hoist them over the horror and into some magical lobster kingdom where dominance dominates. It sucks increasingly to be a guy in the 21st Century. Not materially, mind: existentially. At some point you need to do the Carrie Bradshaw and type it out: does the modern man need to be a douchebag to be happy? The Dandies and Speedoes and Charlatans were good-looking, well-connected, and confident, seemingly happier for inhabiting their little worlds of testosterone defiance. Me and mine were rotting with worry over the grind of lives at migrant camps at the border, a soft-power holocaust in its own right, when you really look at it, and struggled to defend principles the EU itself was really only one foot in. And it didn’t help that sometimes love felt all too much like work.
The Charlatan too had a a girlfriend. I watched her help his giant upper body into a tight leather jacket. They too must have fought over whose turn it is to bring the groceries. But then he would do the dishes to compensate, or defend her in public, and she would tease him that he’s a feminist. No, he would argue; this is just chivalry, guys who claim to be feminists are those looking to get laid. One of them must have made more money. When a big trip was desired one might have to stay behind, out of pride in one’s independence, or respect for the other’s.
But in softer moments they would acknowledge that long love is a blessing, and it doesn’t seem to grow much outside the standard relationship format. They might have conceited themselves, secretly, in a sphere that’s not quite ideas and not quite emotions, that by making it work they’re making the world work, they’re pumping a bit more sense into the clusterfuck of NGOs and Pride Parades. Would that make him feel like he was one of the good ones? If it did, was it enough?
A friend shows up, another lighter-skinned Brazilian who would give it up for Mito in ’18. Much more so than us, Brazilians are hot country people, who tend to wilt in the Hungarian winter. Birthday Boy is the office go-to for photo ops and seems to have lots of friends. But to me he always gave off a faint sadness.
The friend is late because of gym and he’s also kind of blown the surprise. Like most days he’s aloof and low-energy, weary from a failed relationship and all his compatriots gradually leaving Hungary, moving on or moving back. I’d come to think of him as the Mumbler, because, when he delivered an opinion he would speak with his mouth shut and end on a resigned “I don’t know”.
I would laugh at him: “What do you know, man?”
the Budafoki amended 