SWU Channel Update-March 2024

Pinned by Soft White Underbelly 

@extrageneity -- I think a lot when I watch this channel about the end of Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson was trying to do, through his brand of drug-addled, autobiographical journalism, similar to what Soft White Underbelly is doing: Capture a picture of the world we don't see, in the hopes of changing how we understand the world that's normally shown to us. Thompson gives a deeply personal, chapters-long narrative about the men he met from that biker gang, about their history, about their interactions with them, about their perspective on violence and straight society, about everything. Then, at the very end, he writes an afterward, about how his time with the gang ended abruptly when one of them, for not much reason, beat him up, with some help but also with some pulling-away by the man's gang brothers. Thompson writes about this very sparsely compared to how he writes the rest of the book--not seeking to put us in that room, in that moment, with him. He simply says, angrily, that they turned on him and that now he's done with them. Sonny Barger, one of the most important of the Angels from that era, was there, and says that by his club's rules, Thompson had the beating coming to him.

This channel, more than anything, is a story about hustlers of all kinds. People who step outside normal boundaries of society, out of need or trauma or boredom. People who break laws, who live rough, who sell themselves, who hurt others, all to survive. Outlaws--people who live, or who have lived, outside the law. Survival systematically trumps, if not decency, respectability, for most of them--as it would for most of us in similar circumstances. There are other stories told here, too--SWU's interview style, patient, non-judgmental, listening with empathy, that style can be used to draw out all kinds of stories from all kinds of people. But mostly, it's stories of people who are hustling to survive, who are in that struggle for some kind of reason, and who might still someday be utterly defeated by whatever that reason is.

Thompson was telling a story about violent outlaws, who ultimately turned that violence on him. SWU is telling a story about hustler outlaws, who have repeatedly sought--at times successfully, at times not--to hustle him. But there's a deep overlap between the desperation of outlaw violence and the desperation of outlaw hustling. Getting hustled is far from the worst that could happen to someone doing this work.

So, I don't just watch. I watch, and I worry. But then, after worrying for a while, I think about how outlaw risk threatens us all, whether we seek it out or not. The school children in Sandy Hook, in Uvalde, hadn't invited outlaw danger the way Thompson did, the way Mark does. It simply came for them one day. I wonder if maybe projects like this one are the only hope we have of ever really understanding why.