Big Jim

"The same people who say they’re against organized religion are all card-carrying members of the Church of Universal Human Equality, which is perhaps the best organized, most well-funded, and least tolerant mythological system on Earth."
—Jim Goad

I should preface this by stating that, no, I didn't personally agree with all of Jim Goad's opinions or writings.

We clear on that?

Okay.

Having said that, the news I found out last night—on X, of all places—that Jim Goad had died was a little shocking to me. I was influenced mega-bigly by Mr. Goad's often satirical, always controversial, and downright goldurn triggering writings.

From his controversial and explicit underground magazine ("zine," in olden parlance), ANSWER Me!—the last issue of which, called the "R*pe Issue," sparked a Bellingham, Washington, obscenity trial in 1993—to his writings for various, often wildly divergent publications, such as Taki's Magazine, the paleoconservative online magazine; and, of course, books like The Redneck Manifesto (Simon and Schuster, 1997) and Shit Magnet (Feral House, 2002), as well as countless website articles and posts, I knew Jim Goad as the purveyor of polarizing, often puerile, always inflammatory satirical social commentary. I first discovered him while sitting in a campus eatery at Ball State University, round about the good year 2001 or so, reading the newly acquired fourth installment of his notorious zine (and I had to be careful no one noticed the cover, which featured the word "r*pe" in very large letters at the bottom).

His writing style was abrasive, humorous, often shocking, always incendiary, and willing to slay the sacred cows of generally accepted politically correct discourse. Jim wrote like a madman and took no prisoners. His scorching humor—a stiletto-sharp blade that cut through the hypocrisy surrounding issues such as race, class, and privilege—was often the cover, one suspected, for a deeply hurt, insecure, inwardly bleeding ego, one that projected the scuffed exterior of a cynic with a rapier wit.

The early 2000s were a time when "woke" was first being inculcated into the cultural stream under the rubric of political correctness, a form of blanket Orwellian speech coding and a philosophical worldview that pitted the white, European-derived "Oppressor Class" against a global swath of humanity, adopting what Anton LaVey called "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"; i.e., the hegemony of leftist academics who had imposed a burden of guilt upon society based not on economic privilege, but who had redefined it, in the Gramscian sense, as the struggle against an inherently "guilty" white, European, Western imperialist force. Any rebellion against this outlook was perceived not as simple disagreement or philosophical divergence, but as unremitting "evil."

The Misanthropic "Cutting Edge"

The countercultural misanthropes of the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of whom appeared alongside Goad in books such as the anthology Apocalypse Culture 2 (Feral Huse, 2000) by the late Adam Parfrey—the maverick publisher behind the once-explosive, now rather tame Feral House—put their thumbs up the angry asses of academia and refused to be cowed by accusations of racism, sexism, classism, or whatever the fashionable "-ism" of the day happened to be.

Some were outright Satanists. All were cynical, skeptical, and realists, inasmuch as they were suspicious of the cult-like tendencies of those who would repurpose religious fervor into an equally masochistic devotion to a "social gospel" of unqualified egalitarianism—or, as Adam Parfrey put it, "professional victimhood."

Goad's The Redneck Manifesto posited that wealthy elites conspired to pit poor rural whites and blacks at each other's throats in order to "divide and conquer" as the basis for maintaining power and economic control. His Shit Magnet was a far more personal deep dive into his life as a white, blue-collar "absorber" of the social burdens and various guilts levied against him by a society that saw him as little more than a convenient scapegoat for its social ills.

Shit Magnet was written while Goad was serving two years in prison in Oregon for beating his girlfriend, Anne "Skye" Ryan, during an altercation in a speeding car. This occurred while he was still married to his wife Debbie, who was dying of ovarian cancer.

I didn't claim he was an all-around nice guy, square john, good citizen, now, did I?

Neither would Jim.

Later Life

He produced numerous collections of essays, writing with the balls-to-the-wall fury of Lester Bangs, but with far more precision. He didn't always stick to the most controversial topics, also producing books like Jim Goad's Gigantic Book of Sex (Feral House, 2007), but later works, such as The Bomb Inside My Brain (2019) and The New Church Ladies (Obnoxious Books, 2017), took aim at the increasingly strident authoritarianism of left-wing culture vultures.

His musical collaborations included Big Red Goad, his touring band, as well as albums such as S.W.A.T.: Deep Inside a Cop's Mind (Amphetamine Reptile, 1994), with Anton LaVey, Boyd Rice, and members of Poison Idea.

His later life included humorous and biting podcast appearances, such as Hardballs, along with a continual decline in health. In 2008, he survived a seizure-inducing brain tumor. He later survived bouts with prostate cancer and depression, and remarried for the third time to his wife, Norma.

Because of his declining health, his last years were shadowed by lethargy and anxiety. He died on June 22. He was 65.

Jim Goad was, and will forever be, the voice in my head—or, at least, one of them, in a literary sense. Before I ever actually heard his voice, I always imagined him sounding a little like Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. (I told him this during an encounter on Facebook.)

You know, as Jim would say:

"White trash with a brain."

His writing style influenced mine incalculably. When it's good, it's a little like something Jim might write.

At least, I tell myself that.

Keep a-rockin', Big Jim.

RIP.

You will be missed.

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