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1. REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST SUBCULTURE SCENESTER…
   An individual who went through adult life with the name Aragorn Exclamation Point — and no, I’m not making this up — was a Grand Poobah of the Harry Potter fan and role-playing gamer subculture that gets called anarchism in today’s United States. This scenester died last Thursday. This most august and solemn occasion elicits the following humble enconmium:

   I was in or around the United States anarchist subculture for 34 years. I have never encountered any persuasive argument against the possibility of an anarchist society or authentic anarchic social relations from apologists for capitalism. Unfortunately the United States anarchist subculture is a repetitive long-running persuasive argument here. The U.S. Circle-A-playpen is a wholly owned subsidiary of the all-entertainment, all-of-the-time ethos of mainstream US consumer capitalism. The contemporary United States anarchist subculture is also a lock-step loyal expression of the tendency to extreme narcissism and infantilism in United States culture. The anarchist subculture appeals to people who need to pretend that the world revolves around them. Its main audience is children who haven’t become adults yet, children who are hell-bent on never becoming adults, and pathologically self-involved sub-par types who would have be to carried by everybody else in any actual anarchist or communist society.

   My more than a third of a century long experience of the U.S. anarchist scene and its scenesters is that this scene consistently lives down to the most bovine aspersions that might be cast on anarchism by a pig-ignorant country club Republican. U.S. of A-style anarchism is a grease trap of incapacity and terminal disengagement. It is a militantly counter-subversive phenomenon in that it channels young idealistic people into the reproduction of a puerile and foolish subculture instead of catalyzing collective public action that can make a difference in the real world. I had many, many encounters with the late Aragorn Exclamation Point. After I did a presentation about attempts at collective, credible, real world direct action among mainstream wage-earners at The Long Haul, in Berkeley, California in the late autumn of 2012 Aragorn Exclamation Point got to say his peace, perspectives indistinguishable from that of any other reactionary-by-default middle class slob asshole in the United States, garnished with stale window dressing about anarchy, personal autonomy and similar Romper Room nostrums.

   Aragorn Exclamation Point epitomized everything that stinks about this subculture; he was a veritable High Pontiff among the spuds and duds of the putrid and politically worthless U.S. anarchist feeb-scene. For this guy everything was all about ego-gratifying play dates with his fellow indifferent-to-the-big-bad-world subculture slobs. People who help this algal bloom of a scene to spread in its full effulgence are a blight on the social landscape. I’m not exactly happy that Aragorn Exclamation Point died — what kind of adult goes through life named after the mighty warrior hero in a Tolkien novel? This mighty rebel against all authority with a highly abstract capital A couldn’t even rebel against his hippie parents for hanging such a stupid handle on him. The shit encountered in this scene is beyond lampooning in cheap shot caustic fiction — but his demise doesn’t harm in the slightest the prospects for a real world conscious, collective opposition to capitalism among those of us who must sell our labor power for wages and have nothing to lose but our pains, under the most promising circumstances that have ever existed for this, in the now fast-declining main problem country of the world.

   Kevin Keating

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2. How old was he?

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   • I think he was about 50.

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3. As with my own Lust-for-Life Library (and other projects), archiving Aragorn’s still-active projects (e.g., books, web, LBC) onto drives allows them to be availed anywhere, esp. if the domains “go poof” from a lack of time/attention/diligence/will required to sustain any project. My own experience (cross-platform, forums, domain’ed web pages, server, etc.) may be useful to anyone tackling said tasks.

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