Boys’ Lives
by Sam Thielman
When I was a kid I had a subscription to Boys’ Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. It ran some okay fiction and some outdoorsy nonfiction that was about as boring as toast and, occasionally, a comic strip adaptation of a lesser Isaac Asimov novel, which I would clip and save in a blue schoolwork folder.
But the best part of Boys’ Life, as any reader will attest, was the two pages devoted to cheap plastic crap sold at outrageous prices by the Johnson Smith Company, the elderly novelty concern that has for decades been this country’s primary purveyor of fake dogshit, fake vomit, fake broken eggs, fake boogers, fake knife wounds, and books on hypnosis. I used to send away for their book-length catalog, which reliably had a page’s worth of fake Nazi medals (“Imperial Germany’s highest World War I award for bravery!”) for sale near the belt buckles that said AMERICAN LAWMAN and hats that said POLICE. The Confederate flags were over near the old coins. The Marine Corps shirts and hats were somewhere else entirely.
When I was a kid I thought all this stuff was kind of edgy but I never thought of myself as tough in that way. I knew the kids who did; they sucked and their dads sucked worse. There is a kind of ambient Nazism in American culture, untethered to any specific social movement, but it is never entirely free of association. Nazi tattoos can’t exist without skin. There’s somebody in that skin. The Nazi tattoo tells you who it is.
Six years ago I and two of my colleagues at the Columbia University School of Journalism attended a right-wing “straight pride” march in Boston, to which a gangrenous little anticommunist group calling itself Super Happy Fun America had invited the British racism influencer Milo Yiannopoulos and sundry other regrettable characters. My friend Ishaan was and is an ingenious computer scientist working on what people now call OSINT—open-source intelligence, as opposed to SIGINT, which is to say signals intelligence, and HUMINT, or human intelligence—and he and I both admired the photographer Nina Berman, who joined us, too. Since “straight pride” was obviously a euphemism for homophobia and Super Happy Fun America was merely a rebranding exercise for a fascist group previously known as Resist Marxism, we thought we ought to parse the symbology the attendees used during their parade and speeches for hidden meanings.
In this we were sorely disappointed. None of the attendees had bothered to hide their affiliations in coy language or coded images. They simply broadcast their hatred in the baldest terms possible and then lied about it under questioning. One man had SS bolts on his knuckles, which he said represented his heritage. Another had a Nazi soldier tattooed on his shoulder and a knife in a sheath on his belt and I’m afraid I quailed at the notion of asking him stupid questions about what they represented. In my defense I can only say that it seemed to me that talking to these men at all was in some way an act of cowardice. They had gathered together to make themselves clear: Their perfectly legible position was that we should join them in exterminating everyone else or die. Questioning them further about that position was to invite contempt, and rightly so; sides had been taken. I was unarmed, as I always am, and all that was left to me was to observe or run away, so I observed. The rally descended into violence—led, predictably, by the police—against the local counterprotesters.
I don’t give two shits what mysteries lie in Graham Platner’s secret heart. I don’t think he is playing some elaborate game of cat and mouse with the press or with the left or the White Working Class, I think he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest and got it covered up with a tough-guy tattoo of a wolf when his campaign told him he had to get rid of it. There’s nothing left to discuss. When you see these people in public with their literal branding on display, you do not need to ask them probing questions or scour their records for corroboration. Your work is done. Everything you need to know is no more than skin deep.