In Memoriam: Justin Horne

 

Around 7pm on Tuesday, October 23, 2006, my plane touched down at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport after an exhausting 24 hour trip from Moscow.  I had been working in Asia for a long, bureaucratic year followed by a couple months of rough travel via cab, ferry, train, and horse, a trek finally concluded with a flight back home through Zurich and Chicago.  When the seat belt lights turned off the passengers jumped to their feet as if prompted by a dog whistle.  Unwilling to join the mad scramble for luggage, I remained in my seat while the others awkwardly clogged the aisle for the next ten minutes.

It was then that a morbid sensation crept over me, like a warped combination of vertigo, diaphragm paralysis, and some kind of static shroud numbing my torso.  Maybe the Swiss had spiked my complimentary pretzels with delayed release angel dust.  Or maybe culture shock had simply come early.  Either notion seemed doubtful as I was perfectly lucid and had yet to soak up the buzzing aura of highways and billboards outside.  Finally I got up and staggered off the plane, unable to shake the clinging disturbance.

Hours later came the horrible news that Justin Horne had been murdered.  Right when my plane landed.  The mental tightrope I'd been walking between clenched tension and off-kilter denial suddenly snapped.  Too much to bear, a primitive survival mechanism from deep beneath the forebrain quickly released a numbing agent, and I drifted through the rest of the week in a blank stupor.

Death is a concept I came to terms with long ago.  It's probably a lot like that carefree time I spent before I was alive.  But the sharp, deliberate act of killing has always been too gruesome for the mind to process neatly.  Particularly in Justin's case, shot at close range in his home with a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun.  The culprit was his roommate/landlord, who had failed to pay their electricity bill and Justin was confronting.  Mid-conversation he shot Justin and then killed himself.

Beyond the obvious tragedy of losing a friend was the cruel, stone-cold fact that my corner of the world had just lost one of its most distinctive social renegades.  But far from a shining champion of truth and decency, Justin was more like an unbreakable mutant who refused to be caged.  If there was ever a boundary he would attempt to crash through it, whether lined with razor wire or patrolled by common sense.

Many were repelled by his legendary will to menace.  He was a serial provocateur and hyperactive libertine who thirsted for stimulation and drew it from the shock and confusion of innocent bystanders if he had to.  Somehow he got his hands on an Adolf Hitler trading card which he'd reveal to stunned strangers, silently stroking the portrait as if it were a totem inhabited by his master.

His sense of humor ranged from hellish depravity to a half-sarcastic whimsical pranksterism I doubt even he knew how seriously he took.  Running around the high school like a maniac dressed in a Scream costume while people were in class probably had less to do with inciting fear than with Justin relishing the absurdity.  In a similar vein his midnight hikes invariably resulted in him turning off his flashlight in the middle of the forest and sprinting off into the darkness, only to stealthily return to stalk those left behind.  He did this so often it was more annoying than anything else, but we all knew he was hardwired for the kind of petty mischief that most boys shed at the onset of adolescence.

That treacherous hyena even stole a shirt of mine, a keepsake with "Class of '00" written on the front.  When I caught him wearing it at a party he darted into the other room and changed clothes, eventually offering the ridiculous explanation that he had gotten it from "the store."  I hadn't even bought the thing; it was left behind by a friend visiting from the east coast.  Without skipping a beat he weirdly started muttering that his theft was warranted because I should have given it to him as a present.  It was as if the fiefdom of his own bizarro imagination bled into the reality he shared with everyone else, a mindset totally bewildering to the uninitiated but endearing to his friends, at least when we weren't getting burnt by it.

Justin had a certain maniacal charm that got him out of trouble almost as often as in it.  As rascal incarnate his atrocities were somehow easier to forgive than if they'd been committed by someone you really expected to behave.  Sitting next to him on the bus was like sharing a seat with a clothed spider monkey, a jabbering bundle of chaos who occasionally poked you in the ribs but always made your trip memorable.  I've laughed harder with him than maybe anyone I've ever met, and when I'm playing hover bingo in some holographic nursing home in the year 2093 I have no doubt those moments will be worth more to me than anything I could have possibly shared with the people who wholly dismissed him.

There was brilliance beneath his feral exterior.  It is true that the departed are easy to romanticize, but Justin had a real gift that almost none of his staid contemporaries fully appreciated.  Many threw in their lot with GPAs and social standing as the forced march from K through 12 gradually wore down their character.  But Justin kept on being Justin, grinning like a fiend while constantly hurling bombs at the sanctity of expectations.

I shared a middle school health class with him once that included a Reefer Madness-style drugs and alcohol unit.  For Justin's project he wrote and illustrated his own comic book starring a sword-wielding anti-dope superhero who valiantly sliced apart hapless pot smokers.  It was one of the finest displays of satire I'd ever seen, total subversion of the party line delivered instead of the expected paean to sobriety.  The teacher was so baffled by this "health" presentation that he threw up his hands and passed it, while the other students stared on, quietly awaiting instruction.

Genius bubbled up to the surface more often than once in his short career.  When he was twelve or so he shared with me something that he wrote, a poem whose words escape me.  But its tone sunk in, and the warm echoes of that afternoon bus ride ripple through my head whenever I reflect on the beauty of language.  His layout of rhythm, depth, and structure was masterful, colored with accessible nuance and layers of interlocking metaphors.  It convinced me right then and there that if this reckless beast ever found the discipline, success in the art world would be his for the taking.

But Justin's lifestyle was his preferred expressive format, an audacious and radioactive slap-stick comedy laced with sick humor, frenzied recreation, botched schemes, and a constant undertone of rude wisdom.  I often saw him talk circles around the comparatively polished--model citizens too conditioned by the rat race to realize that he was making a fool out of them and the arbitrary metric by which they weighed their accomplishments against his own.  It was a poetry of sarcasm disguised by low-brow mania, often entertaining no one but himself and alienating countless observers incapable of understanding his twisted brand of social commentary.

Justin regularly swallowed the label of freak as the price of living on his own terms, and for that I am eternally grateful.  The bulk of life's flavor is derived exclusively from the odd.  It is not the mundane shades of convention that sear the deepest into memory, but those salient jolts of the unexpected.  The wild live so that the herd might have something to consider, and in a nobler age the eccentric would be praised for their off-beat insight.  Justin Horne was far from perfect.  But life was more interesting with him than without him, which is why he'll live on in memory as the invaluable trickster, beast, rebel, and friend we loved so much.

On Left, Right, and Ron Paul

A wise old sage once revealed to me a profound truth.  He had fought and won many battles throughout his illustrious career, lancing the dragon of nuclear energy in his early years before moving on to further victories over the corporate titans of ecocide.  Now closer to the end than to the beginning, he devoted what remained of his time on our dimming Eden to the transfer of knowledge to the young, that they might salvage something of a future.  When the aging champion spoke, I listened.

"Do you know the fundamental difference between left- and right-wing?" he asked one evening, with a certain slyness to his tone.

I thought for a second or two, knowing his riddle would demand an unconventional answer.  We had broken bread a few days earlier in a now-defunct café east of downtown, just past the shuttered den of a motorcycle gang the feds had recently raided, near the sidewalk on which the sickly woman with track marks flaunted her high heals.  The sage and I had thoroughly gone over the basics that afternoon, drinking coffee while discussing science, culture, history, and the imperfect world outside.  Having gone that far already, such a simple political question now seemed behind us.

"The left believes established power should be challenged while the right thinks established power should be reinforced," I said.  The two painfully amorphous terms were coined during the French Revolution, when the radicals and reformers sat physically to the left of the General Assembly president, while the monarchists sat to the right.  So, I thought, the original ideological divide should be as sufficient an explanation as any.

"Deeper than that," he said.

"Patriarchical symbolism," I responded, trying yet again.  "Faith in the supposedly 'feminine' value of nurturing as opposed to the supposedly 'masculine' value of force."

"Getting closer," he said.  "But not exactly."  He leaned in to whisper his mystic insight.

"'Left' and 'right' really boil down to one basic question: whether you suspect people are inherently good or evil.  The rightist froths at the idea of a political system helping the less fortunate because natural-born sinners can only be tamed by punishment.  Meanwhile the powerful are virtuous for pushing around the majority who deserve to be controlled.  But to the leftist, the opposite is true: evil is artificial, good natural.  Coercive institutions suppress the purity of the human spirit and should therefore be dismantled.  Remember this axiom: all political debate flows from these two conflicting perceptions of reality."

I'm constantly reminded of the sage's heavy words while watching the 2012 Republican presidential primaries.  For over a year would-be nominees have been climbing over each other to make their case for Order and Discipline, albeit usually phrased in the more palatable language of Freedom and Opportunity.  On the surface it often seems staggeringly bizarre and illogical, as when candidates bemoan the moral decline of the general population while accusing others of "hating America."  But the emotional emphasis of the growling rhetoric is perfectly consistent.  As warned the great sage, at its core is a fierce defense of the authoritarian impulse.  Hence the frequent macho posturing and the growing resemblance of the primary season to a demented pro-wrestling competition.

It all began in earnest when latter-day carnival barker Donald Trump climbed atop a soapbox and pointed to his own muscles.  He worked the Grand Old Party faithful into a frenzy challenging the President to release his long-form birth certificate, if only he had the guts.  When the President did just that, the muscles fell off of poor Mr. Trump, who was promptly booed, pelted with scorn, and abandoned.

The frustrated crowd, still hungering for a strong leader to guide them, next gravitated toward a reputable governor with a decent approval rating named Tim Pawlenty.  But nice guys tend not to fare well with the Party of Blood and Fire, which in a fit of boredom then lurched to one Michele Bachmann.  She thrilled many with dark visions of writing bigotry into the Constitution and her magical health clinic that cured homosexuality.

Tempting, mused observers, until Rick Perry of Texas unveiled his awe-inspiring record of human sacrifice.  "Over two hundred, and it even includes the mentally disabled," he boasted, much to the delight of the Christian rank-and-file.  When he soon proved to be a bit slow himself, pizza mogul Herman Cain seized the spotlight, promising to brutalize the poor with a new federal sales tax and deep cuts to social programs, but he was, alas, quickly undone by a sex scandal.

Today four contenders remain on the stormy field, none quite able to finish off the rest.  Mitt Romney just can't find his inner demon but wins the occasional grunt of respect for his status as unrepentant tycoon.  The Flat Earth contingent salutes Rick Santorum's outspoken defense of dogma over country, but his prissy man-boy schtick has failed to catch fire.  And of course, Newt Gingrich won wild, guttural applause calling Obama the "food stamp president," but now he's strapped for cash, and worse still, has no friends, since his former colleagues have total contempt for his character.

Ron Paul, however, is of a different breed than the others, which is why he'll never be president.  The grandfatherly country doctor of Brüno fame is the rare kind of man who actually lives by his principles.  Yet in a quirk proving definitively that fate operates according to its own sense of humor, this one-in-a-million honest politico keeps his principles firmly planted in the Eighteenth Century.

Congressman Ronald Ernest Paul I, Air Force Captain, Doctor of Medicine, and undisputed leader of the modern "libertarian" movement, insists that the public sector is the primary evil plaguing society.  That the "L" word meant "anarcho-communist" until recently doesn't seem to phase him.  Nor should it, for the traditional definition was junked in North America with the advent of Ayn Rand and a slew of crackpot economists who preached the good news that selfishness is the highest ideal.  Thenceforth, "libertarianism" would mean anything-goes-capitalism under a government so weak that all power to abuse the individual would exclusively lie in the private sector.

This argument for a business-run dystopia rationalizes itself further with a fundamentalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.  As if a vast frontier were still open to settlement and water-powered cotton mills were the height of modern technology, the "strict constructionist" legal theory insists that the role of government today should be the same as it was in 1788.

And herein lies the Ron Paul Paradox.  It is easy to chant the mantra of "small government" as a stock campaign slogan, but quite another to actually believe it.  Into the septic tank of history, should the Paulites ever storm the halls of power, would go everything from warrantless government surveillance, to the Drug War, "enhanced interrogation techniques," hundreds of overseas American military bases checkering the globe, economic blockades, threats of violence against other countries, undeclared war, bailouts of financial institutions, and billions spent annually on corporate welfare.  The leftist heartily drools at the prospect.

But Dr. Paul's anti-government bone saw cuts in two directions.  In keeping with his philosophy of imposing a late-Eighteenth Century government on a Twentieth-first Century people, handguns would be allowed on commercial flights, the EPA gutted, federal lands sold off, Interior and Education Departments abolished, healthcare programs and Social Security phased out, the tax system made regressive, and restrictions lifted on offshore oil drilling.  He is, of course, the only member of Congress to vote against banning lead in children's toys.  After all, it isn't mentioned in the Constitution.

So is the Congressman right-wing or left-wing?  As he can't or won't see that corporate power is as great a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the authority of the state--he is both, and he is neither.  The sage maintained that people tend to take their collection of political beliefs as a package, leaning towards either criticism or support of hierarchy in general.  The traditional instincts of both left and right are violated by Ron Paul in one way or another, which is why he will never gain wide enough popular support to win the presidency on the basis of policy alone.

But while Santorum, Gingrich, and Romney continue to claw at each other on national television, in that surreal traveling circus that is the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, I can't help but root for the old country doctor hurling cognitive monkey wrenches into dumbfounded crowds.  Not just anyone gets away with denouncing militarism in South Carolina, the Cuban embargo in Florida, or ethanol subsidies in Iowa.  As millions are spent by candidates over the coming months subliminally promoting the idea that power justifies itself, victims are persecutors, and war is peace, I'll take as much psychic rebellion as I can get.  At the very least, the absurdity will be priceless.