Q: You've written that your writing and commentaries are part of the American art of self-invention. Can you explain that?
AC 2000: Writing is itself a form of self-invention. One writes to complain, to explain, and to seduce, all of which are intended to change the world to accommodate one's ideal self. In my opinion, one writes to improve one's surroundings for the person one would like to be. Modern America was set up as a utopian project by disgruntled Europeans in search of self-perfection. America is ideal for self-inventors, from religious fanatics to con-men (hard to tell apart) and writers, who are a combination of both. Then there are folks who write for money. I don't know any of them.
AC 2025: The luxury of reinvention has narrowed: you can be a resistance fighter or a nazi. Techno-utopia, digital feudalism and concentration camps are the reality of 2025.
Q: For the boundary-pushing baby boomers, has self-invention (or reinvention) been a natural extension of their restless roots or merely a self-aggrandizing way to stave off aging?
AC 2000: Don't knock staving off aging. What's so great about being a forgetful lump in a wheel-chair? Since America is the land of possibilities, the possibility of staying young forever must rank high. Dying may be inevitable but death can wait. There is creative energy in the pursuit of immortality, as the alchemists knew. It's great to be American, optimistic, and to carry a dozen passports. Of course, at a certain point the young might kill you. That's one of the hazards of hubris.
AC 2025: I was cruel, insensitive to my own future. Not in a wheelchair yet, but not feeling so great. One other passport, not a dozen, would be great. Being an American abroad is no longer either a curiosity or desirable. There was a time in Mexico when Germans driving Jeeps didn’t want to be seen as Americans, so they plastered SOMOS ALEMANOS on their cars, Now I would plaster JE SUIS QUEBECOIS on my forehead.
3. In "The Disappearance of the Outside," you comment on how the materialism of the West is as equally oppressive to the human spirit as that of the Soviet-style Eastern bloc culture that you grew up in. How so?
AC 2000: I never said that they were "equally" oppressive -- I just said that they are both ways of making people do what the system wants. The capitalist way is a lot more pleasant, more persuasive, and more difficult to wake up from. Communism, or whatever passed for it, was direct, brutal, painful, and terrifying. I'll take the first, thank you. But if I could live somewhere without commercials, with perfect fruit ready to eat in the trees, with naked fellow creatures in a state of youthful exuberance, I'll take that.
AC 2O25: Living in the Ozarks close to the Buffalo River National Park in the teens of the new millennium, was pretty edenic. Deer in the woods, owls, mushrooms, caves, millions of stars at night, a few good neighbors. There were also ticks, survivalists, Qanon trumpists, people in Witness Protection, and eccentric loners. These last were OK. You could get choppered out of there if you were really sick, but if you just chopped of a finger, broke a bone or got bit by a rattler, you could go to the veterinarian, an hour’s drive. I did OK without naked fellows, got veal instead from a hunter I let keep a stand in my place. The only real problem in that paradise was when wild pigs started coming in from Colorado and tore up everything. That’s when Trump came to power the first time.
4. With the "Outside" now being a rarely accessible place, is rebellion in America dead?
AC 2000: No, rebellion is now the status quo -- television urges it on everybody. Nobody can be hipper than the Gap or more radical than Mazda.
AC 2025: Rebellion was what got repackaged and resold by Trump & Co, along with phony conspiracies and empty promises. Everybody who voted to Trump thought they were rebellious and old-style Americans. It turned out they were suckers, robbed blind by the lies of a stump preacher.
5. With the boundaries of American rebellion almost fully stretched, has spirituality emerged as the next frontier or outlet for healthy self-expansion? If yes, what has kept it from being a fully successful search?
Spirituality has emerged as a new market, the Inner Market. Tomorrow's capitalists look within. There is a vast area of murky human yearnings that awaits market-research. This is a potentially infinite market and there is nothing to stop it from being commercially successful as long as the current "good" economy persists. But even if the "good" economy goes "bad," spirituality will not fail. On the contrary, it will then be most successful, as a palliative against despair -- the only thing is only the sincere will profit by it.
AC 2025: Wrong. Anyone can profit from it. There is still good money to be made in the “wellness space,” which is spirituality spiced with psychedelics and sci-fi. The AIs will be as sincere as you train them to be. They will be you. The major faiths aren’t going away either, but they’ll adjust to the kleptocracy as they always did, for a percentage.
6. America lost its innocence at the same time your generation, the Baby Boomers of the '60s and '70s, was losing its innocence. What should following generations learn from the triumphs and failures of the changes wrought during that time period? What should they emulate or stay away from?
AC 2000: Who lost their "innocence"? What is that? Granted, the paradisical couple was innocent, but then they pissed off God by discovering their sexual mechanisms. Why did God give them genitals? As a back-up system for when they lost their "innocence"? I swear to you, my generation never had any "innocence." Some commentators might have lost their cherries when their favorite band broke up, but that was a malfunctioning of the pundit system, not a material occurrence.
AC 2025: America was never innocent. Native Americans had a better understanding of nature than the European colonists, but in the end there was no Eden for anybody. What there always was, even for the most idealistic hippies, was a surplus of fantasy. Since the Sixties, the utopias have been slouching toward Silicon Valley and Wall Street like Yeats’s beast. The last rebellion tore down whatever the “American dream” was: it destroyed whatever trust in government there still lingered, even trust in the dollar.
7. Please share with us your most memorable holiday (any holiday between Thanksgiving and New Year's, i.e., Christmas, Hannukah, etc.) experience.
AC 2000: May First, International Workers' Day, eating hotdogs on a row boat with my first girlfriend, Aurelia, on Dumbrava Lake, near Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. We never finished our hotdogs. We got busy losing our "innocence." The boat tipped over and we fell in the water, without breaking stride. We finished losing our "innocence" that same evening, in the cemetery, where we fell into an open grave without losing stride. We did become night creatures after that, though. You see how easy “the ideal” is attained? Now, for something practical and delicious.
AC 2025: I did love the 4th of July for the hot dogs and the kitsch. Now I’m not supposed to eat them.
"What there always was, even for the most idealistic hippies, was a surplus of fantasy." For sure. I was a mini-hippie back then. We were frightened by Agent Orange and body bags and a proliferation of cheap plastic. Felt good to experiment, and to even make art.