Ooohhhh!! I love Charles Bukowski's work! Thanks for this one.

yeah, no doubt. he's like comfort food to me. :)

but when a young radical ends up an
old radical
the critics
and the conservatives
treat him as if he escaped from a mental
institution.

I love these lines because trust me: he probably did.

i wonder if you imply that a "conservative" mindset is a bit like an in-cabeza pysch ward...

what hardly ever happens is
a man going from being a young conservative to becoming an
old wild-ass radical

I wish I could have met Bukowski, because I'm one of those cases of something that hardly ever happens. Of course, he died in March '94, before I even started making that deconversion. I was a young conservative in part because my parents were, and in part because the rhetoric of respect for individuals' dignity appealed to me. I even used to regularly read the National Review, and in very early 90s, under Bush I, it was still a quality magazine. Then Clinton got in, and I started to see a win-at-any-costs ethos pervade the magazine with their endless smears and scandal-mongering, which culminated in the 1994 Gingrich Revolution. That caused me to rethink everything, because for the first time my nose was being positively rubbed in the fact that the Republicans were pandering to a nativist, racist, and fundamentalist right that I preferred to ignore. Gingrich was a megalomaniac—he didn't care about anything except his unending escalation towards Speaker of the House, and would bring along all the far-right with him if it got him what he wanted. I hope he won't listen to the people who float his name as a presidential candidate.

Rather than just staying content blaming Gingrich for the state of the party, I started questioning myself and asking if my views were truly served by being a conservative. I realized that I was simply treating civil rights for people of color and women as a dead letter which could be safely brought under the umbrella of conservatism, ignoring their ongoing struggles, that I was ignoring the GLBT community entirely, and that I really wasn't looking with clarity at what Republican policies were doing to the working class—my class. I bypassed being a liberal Democrat, because I don't think they have any clear idea about what to do for the working class, and they're retrograde on race, etc.

Instead, I became a closeted socialist through much of high school, until I started realizing that social democratic nations played out the same power dynamics as in American politics: the rich set the agenda and decide for the poor, who are shut out of any decision making process and screwed over. Then I started reading on anarcho-communism and related movements. Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread had the same revelatory effect on me as it did on Flores Magón. I thought I was alone with my questions and reservations, and here was a man who had figured it out 100 years before me!

Because every step in my deconversion was due to losing yet another belief I had naïvely held since childhood, I think I'll probably end my days as the same radical I am now. I've jettisoned what I already think is wrong, and it's hard to see how any change in me will bring the credo of American civil religion, long dead to me, back to life.

what a fantastic story. and well written. thank you.

I've continued to move more toward radical as I get older, and I do feel as if each step I'm escaping from a mental institution.

yo entiendo, bro.