This week we're running a small package of essays on the topic of nuisances. Why? That's an annoying question.
There are nuisances to be endured in any living situation. I am far from the first rapidly aging man to have abandoned city living—and an apartment with walls that were constantly rattled by an adjacent night club—for a more suburban environment, only to discover that quieting the walls did not solve all of my life's problems. Rambunctious all-night DJ sets have been replaced by fallen trees, frozen pipes, and shockingly persistent visits from both Jehovah's Witnesses and Moonies, all of them timeless annoyances. Also there's the reactionary newspaper that shows up roughly once a month.
The first few times the Lincoln Eagle showed up in my driveway, I didn't pay it much notice. Tucked in its blue waterproof bag, the paper felt light and insubstantial. I figured it for a catalog of coupons, and kept tossing it into the trash bin without even removing it from the plastic. But one day, perhaps urged on by some subconscious solidarity with fellow purveyors of independent media, I decided to see what was in the bag.
What I found was a newspaper unlike anything I'd ever seen before. The Lincoln Eagle is a monthly publication written and edited by what I assume to be a small but dedicated group of local cranks. Most of the articles are written by Joe Toscano and Glenn H. Chapman, whose author photo is a poorly cropped illustration of him smoking a cigar. Opening an issue for the first time, in November of 2022, I was confronted by a letter from the owner and editor, Mike Marnell, which began like this:
I'm not going to write about the crap that's going on in our country. It's in our faces every day. I guess we just have to wait for the next election and pray that major changes happen.
I've never seen this country so divided in all of my 68 years of "A Wonderful Life." I've had the Police call me to tell me that someone is trying to have me arrested for leaving one of my FREE HOME Delivery Lincoln Eagle's on their property. I've been to court. We've met and had run-ins with many nasty people. They chase us down the street. They've even contacted the DPW to enforce a littering law against us. Lol. I used to think it was comical but now it's just a pain in the ass. We will be limiting our free deliveries to areas that haven't been so hostile, so far. No more, "Everybody gets one."
Today I'm going to write about something more positive.
The rest of the letter is about the fact that a friend of his recently died.
You won't be surprised to learn that much of the Lincoln Eagle's coverage over the last few years has been concerned with topics like the border crisis, critical race theory, and the looming threat of communism. But suffusing articles on these garden-variety reactionary fixations is an undeniable sense of style, as evidenced by the fact that I still regularly think about the first time I turned the page to see the headline "WHEN I FINALLY LEAVE THESE BONES" above a Glenn Chapman byline and a small photo of a hand resting on a black skull.
The article is simply Chapman's recounting of times in his life when he's almost died, which include 1) getting hit by a car while riding his bike as a child and 2) stepping straight over the edge of a 25-foot cliff while walking in the woods at night with a girl. I was obviously drawn in by the headline and the accompanying art, and was shocked to discover traces of craft in the article. In describing the sense of inevitability he felt immediately after being struck by the car: "I felt no emotion towards what my body was about to go through. It was like I was kicking off an old ripped pair of jeans knowing I was never going to wear them again." OK, Glenn, damn.
I know that in the most basic sense there's not much difference between the writers and editors of the Lincoln Eagle and the legions of Facebook Uncles and Oakley-selfie models who spend all day filling up social media with their anxieties and grievances. I'm sure they all voted for the same guy; I'm sure they're all mad about the same boring stuff in more or less the same boring ways. But there is a difference in approach I have come to appreciate. The sentiments and ideas at the core of one of Chapman's raving articles about how foreign saboteurs may or may not have infiltrated the United States for the purpose of setting fire to our poultry farms might not be much different from those inspiring a series of shitty social media posts with the worst image macro you've ever seen, but the formal expression is meaningfully different. Encounter enough Groypers straining to deploy some overcooked meme, and the headline "A DARK WINTER APPROACHES," followed by an unironic trigger warning, arrives like a refreshing breeze:
There is a frictionless quality to the internet that makes the schools of reactionary thinking it produces as insufferable as they are malicious. This technology makes it very easy to become and remain insane in extremely boilerplate ways, but that ease also flattens it; it is amazing how dull and lifeless the most lurid and anti-social fantasies become, and how quickly. It's striking how passive this aggression is from one moment to the next—just one little nudge after another, further and further out, to people who want to take that ride, or don't even know they're taking it. You can spend hours speaking some of history's dumbest thoughts into a podcast mic and only ever hear, "Damn, that's crazy," in response; you can post your way into becoming a right-wing intellectual despite never having a thought that takes more than 240 characters to express; you can become an unelected shadow president and not have anything more interesting to say than, "I am become meme ... yeah pretty much," when given the chance to talk about how you have been empowered to singlehandedly reshape the country.
Elon Musk went crazy by falling into a slipstream of tweets and replying, "Wow," at every verified white supremacist he came across. I don't know how Glenn Chapman went crazy, but I'm sure he put more effort into it than that. I'm sure Musk doesn't have any life experiences as funny or meaningful as walking off a cliff in a pitch-black forest. And I don't know what the proprietors of the Lincoln Eagle hope to accomplish by occasionally dropping their newspaper onto people's driveways, but it is not retweets and cheap engagement they are after. Whenever I see Musk or someone like him post one of the most vile thoughts imaginable before putting their phone back in their pocket and going about their day, I think about the editor of the Lincoln Eagle delivering his papers on some cold February morning, being chased down the street, and having the cops called on him. I think about the amount of time Glenn Chapman spends writing his articles, and the money that gets spent putting them into a physical newspaper. This is what being a crank should require—time, effort, consequences. If it wasn't so easy, maybe not everyone would do it.
