Evasion: Responsibility and Rebellion with CrimethInc. and Wendell Berry
(anti-© 2001)
The ‘90s hardcore scene was a wild and wooly place: fights interrupted performances, militant straight edgers attacked people who drank beer, and the Animal Liberation Front hosted fundraising events. As I see it, hardcore was an adaptive response of people born into a culture of nothing and thus with no choice but to make that nothing be everything. It was an evasion in search of something else.
In that regard, it’s incredible to see how many of the perspectives put forward in ‘80s and ‘90s hardcore circles have surfaced in mainstream discourse over the last 10-15 years. Despite its limitations, the culture was light years ahead of its time in discussing animal rights, police violence, and racial inequality.
CrimethInc. was one of the more overtly political participants in the culture. It was (and I guess still is) a type of anarchist cooperative that released books, records, fanzines, etc. I remember seeing their Adbusters-style spoof advertisements and vaguely Situationist publications at shows and thought they were intriguing enough. This was before everything could be traced to its Instagram page thirty seconds after seeing it, and stray photocopies of provocative hoax articles could elicit a sense of genuine mystery.
“The opium of a new generation.” One of the original CrimethInc. flyers (anti-© 1990sish?)
So, CrimethInc. was already on my radar when Evasion was first released in 2001. I don’t remember where I got it. Looking at it now, I see the copyright page mentions an address in Atlanta, and I guess I must have ordered it from there.
Evasion is part Yippie how-to manual and part Kerouac-style travelogue. It was something of a Steal This Bookfor the militant vegan/straight edge set. The book documents the author’s (likely somewhat fictionalized) lifestyle of squatting in buildings, dumpster diving for food, hitchhiking, attending punk rock concerts, and shoplifting.
At the time, the author was a shadowy figure known as “Mack Evasion.” Not a lot of his back story was publicly known, though virtually all indicators point to him having been Peter Young. As it turns out, Young had originally xeroxed ten copies of Evasion as a fanzine that then found its way into the hands of the CrimethInc. folks who published it as the book that made its way into my disaffected teenage hands a few years later.
The book isn’t subtle in its attempt to politicize degeneracy. Time and again it bludgeons the reader with some version of Brecht’s famous quip “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” (slightly more modest, the Evasion version might run “What is the theft of organic orange juice compared to the founding of a Whole Foods?”). It paints a number of villains of the sort one would expect, but the main target is wage labor.
If he’s to be believed, “Mack Evasion” has a hilarious origin story. As Young tells it, it was none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy, apparently an acquaintance of Young’s father, who issued the germ of Evasion when he told an adolescent Young to avoid work at all costs. A great story, and actually quite fitting—Bill Nye’s response to climate change deniers was pretty punk.
“A liberating tale for anyone told that they must go to school, get a job, and give up their values”
It must be an unwritten law of the universe that anyone who has heard of Evasion make the same critique: Mack’s model doesn’t scale. After all, the dumpster would dry up if we all tried dumpstering our soy milk, right?
True as far as it goes, but I always thought the ritual of running through that critique was a little tedious. I mean, to be fair to both Young and the CrimethInc. editors, they’re clear from the outset that the book doesn’t aspire to set forward a revolutionary program.
If the first obligatory critique is the book’s lack of a substantive social vision, then the second is its suburban self-indulgence. It’s important but trivially easy to make the case that Mack’s lifestyle had quite a bit to do with his ethnoracial identity and social class background. Some version of the modern account of that critique goes back to Updike’s savaging of Harry Angstrom and Mailer’s of the beat generation, and it’s not wrong. Really, Mack is his own worst enemy here. He was probably in his early twenties when he wrote Evasion, and the book has the shrill tone of the overly literal, know-it-all teen.
However, as above, one wonders if there might not be more here. As it turns out, the reason Young hid his identity wasn’t merely a matter of fashion--at the time that Evasion was rocketing up the punk rock charts, he was living underground and on the run from the FBI.
Long story short: the FBI had categorized Young as an ecoterrorist after he’d released minks from a factory farm in Wisconsin. Why did he do that? The living conditions for animals are famously bad on factory farms, and of course the minks were likely to be killed to make clothing, so Young felt his choice to risk imprisonment for the sake of decreasing animal suffering was justified. Ultimately, he spent two years in federal prison after living under assumed identities for nearly seven.
Peter Young
The point isn’t whether there is anything to Young’s analysis or methods. Rather, the idea is that the author’s suburban silliness looks different when seen from the perspective of someone willing to go to federal prison for their beliefs; if nothing else, it casts the self-indulgence of Evasion in a different light.
Interestingly, Young himself seems to speak to this point in a 2012 talk when he says the following (25:01):
[After prison] I sort of stepped into another life. But it was one I could feel a lot better about because I’d spent a lot of years sort of being…an unintentional spokesperson for like [a] hedonistic punk rock lifestyle…and that was great…and it helped a lot of people…you know, it was cool, but I felt a lot better being back in the animal rights movement, doing something I felt really good about, helping, you know, animals that have no voice, and that was something I just felt so much better about in terms of like having a role in this world.
Doubtless part of his response centers as much on impatience with the role of being a spokesperson of the lifestyle as much as the lifestyle itself. Still, while Young doesn’t disavow the methods detailed in Evasion, he does refer to the lifestyle as “hedonistic” and imply that he felt better when he moved on to more substantive ethical commitments.
This brings us to the thorny relationship between personal responsibility and juvenile self-indulgence in a culture that can’t quite sort the two out. Perhaps this is yet another case where the hardcore vanguard was just a little ahead of the curve: the question of immaturity feels very much of the moment.
America is looking rather gawky in its awkward adolescence and can’t seem to quite get its footing in figuring out its relationship with responsibility. One detects a certain distrust of American self-indulgence in so much of contemporary criticism (Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, David Goggins, etc.). Even Bill Nye in the clip cited above refers to the self-infantilizing of climate change deniers.
However, from another perspective, this is less a recent crisis than an articulation or exacerbation of an underlying cultural dynamic. It is perhaps fitting that the brilliant Wendell Berry’s “Writer and Region” diagnoses a similar cultural impulse at work in Huckleberry Finn—one of the canonical entries in the genre of which Evasion partakes. Consider:
The real ‘evasion’ of the last chapter is Huck’s, or Mark Twain’s, evasion of the community responsibility which would have been a natural and expectable next step after his declaration of loyalty to his friend….Huck, whom we next see, not as a grown man but as a partner in another boyish evasion….I am supposing, then, that Huckleberry Finn fails in failing to imagine a responsible, adult community life. And I am supposing further that this is the failure of Mark Twain’s life, and of our life, so far, as a society (20).
The repetition of the term “evasion” in the passage above is delicious for our purposes. Yet, in “Writer and Region,” Berry points to a different evasion than that given in Evasion. On this account, instead Mack’s principled, Thoreauvian version of evasion, Berry instead points to a regrettable, childish evasion of meaningful responsibility that is at the heart of American society.
The disjuncture is clear. On the one hand, Mack’s Evasion is premised on social critique. And it’s not altogether wrong—the organization of labor in post-industrial societies has obvious issues. Given the realities of managerial capitalism, it’s hard not to blame anyone for wanting to dumpster dive rather than spend the rest of their short life on yet another Zoom call.
On the other hand, it’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A rejection of alienated labor and consumer responsibility can easily slip into a rejection of meaningful labor and substantive responsibility. Separating one from the other is no easy task in a society that is at best experiencing growing pains and at worst providing evidence that it is fundamentally misguided. It’s hard not to be of two minds on this, and one of my favorite parts of Berry’s essay is his open discomfort with its conclusions (19-20).
Then again, maybe I’m just struggling with my own veneration of frivolity: despite my best efforts, I’m as American as they come (my Colombian girlfriend once teased me that the reason why I’m never homesick is because I spontaneously generate a field of Americana wherever I go). Maybe I just don’t want to give up my own knee-jerk romanticizing of the “spirit of youth.”
Despite seeming like overgrown adolescents, maybe we’re not quite adolescent enough. Or maybe too much? What’s medicine and what’s candy here?
For me, and I think for a lot of us, that really is a question at the heart of how to be an adult in contemporary America. Who knows—maybe a mature Mack Evasion can give us insight into exactly what it is that we want to evade.