krozruch

It must be over 20 years ago I first had the idea for The Journal of Anger Management Studies. It was the Bush years. The Bush and Blair years. Those planes had gone into the towers in the September of my final year studying politics at Nottingham. What was I doing when I heard about it? That might be the obvious question, though nobody has asked about it in the way that people once asked about the assassination of JFK (my Dad was in a cinema — in Britain by then, I suppose, though I’m far from certain he was not still in Donegal — where they put up a stencil with the news in front of the projector). Had they asked, I might or might not have told them I had been writing an email to a friend, Beatnick, who was perhaps by then already in California where he would enjoy a year out from his American Studies course, attending lectures by Noam Chomsky (where he would draw caricatures of him) and doing internships at punk and hip hop record labels. The email, written in that inimitable style I was known for — hifalutin, sardonic, near-psychedelic free association — described an idea for a Great American Novel: a successful, rich white guy goes in for an operation to have his penis extended; it turns out the penises have been harvested from death row inmates and he has a black cock; having watched a documentary on people whose personalities changed after heart transplants, he convinced himself he is different since the operation and he goes on an American Psycho-style rampage (I never read it, never wanted to read it, but heard plenty about it that first couple of years of uni); it then transpires that the unwitting donor turns out to have been innocent. University was the only place I spoke about my writing, though “ADHD” would mean I didn’t finish a thing for years, and haven’t ever since. Still, I wasn’t serious about this idea. Perhaps I should have been. I deleted the draft, I suppose, when my dad came in and told me to come and watch the news.

We never much talked about it. Except those times we met the people who were, like, of course it was an inside job. But it changed everything. In a way that makes it hard to remember the context we knew. Bush and Blair, invidious as their very names may remain to us, are small beer now once we have known Trump and have lived through the disruption of everything we might once have understood to be social life.

At the time, The Journal of Anger Management Theory was inspired by… By the opposition to the TRIPS Agreement… By opposition to the lies of the wars of those days — wars which further destabilised the Middle East… By an idea of zines and of punk…

The internet was new. Or it felt new. It had promise. And I didn’t understand a thing about it. And it would be another ten years before I was able to hold on to a coherent thought.

Bush and Blair laid down much of the groundwork for what was to come. The both of them made Trump possible. But Trump is but a symptom of the world we are living in these, well, how many crises later?

It was Iraq as much as Milan Kundera, who I came to via Raymond Carver, that sent me to Prague that first time at the end of 2003, just under a year after I marched against the war and almost missed the bus back to the West Midlands having bumped into Beatnick and others from uni. I am as different now as the world around me is when I look back on those days I was barely present for, being forever in a “pea souper” of brain fog and undiagnosed disinhibition. Still, I now know as much as most people what we mean by communism. And the world we are living in is as formed of an unsane ideology as that world ever was. Only the real danger is that almost nobody now knows it as they did then.

The Journal of Anger Management Studies is informed by a number of concepts and critiques. I will reveal them, not only here, and indeed not primarily here, over time. There is samizdat, as there is the punk zine. There is a species of Nu-luddism, as there is a fork of the free software movement. There is remix culture. I do and I don’t feel ready to tell you about it. But everything we might once have believed in is broken and we need to talk about it.