Hella Nation - Evan Wright [6]
I also learned during that time with the neo-Nazis that the closer I came to things that from afar had frightened or disturbed me, the less power they held. Later, I would hear New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman refer to reporting from tense situations as the thrill of “mainlining history.”
I had given up powerful intoxicants about the time I embarked on a reporting career, and it became obvious that harrowing circumstances in the field helped fill a void created by the absence of personal dramas brought on by drink. (I was the sort of drinker for whom calamity was almost as desirable and stimulating as intoxication itself.) When I arrived in Afghanistan in 2002 on assignment for Rolling Stone (accompanied again by photographer Nathaniel Welch), the first morning I woke up in a combat zone felt easier, more carefree than the start of a typical day in Los Angeles after a night—or several—of hard, blackout drinking.
When I sat down to write the neo-Nazi feature for Hustler magazine I avoided making overt moral commentary on my subjects, the same as I would in a history paper about a subculture in the remote past. I would let events and sources speak for themselves, which I believed would be the most powerful means of indicting the movement. But when I’d finished writing the piece I worried it was too unfiltered. Perhaps I should have stated the reporter’s opinion somewhere that neo-Nazis are bad? I submitted the unpublished manuscript to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its view on the piece. Erin Zelle, an ADL researcher who specialized in white supremacist groups, recommended the story be published without any changes. Zelle believed the piece effectively skewered the Aryan Nations through its members’ own words. She warned me of the possibility of reprisals.
The only attack came from The New York Times, when Max Frankel, the paper’s former executive editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, published an opinion piece on Larry Flynt. In it he reviewed Hustler magazine, singling out my article on the Aryan Nations, “Heil Hitler, America!” as the “vilest prose masquerading as reportage.” He called it a “palpable fiction . . . slyly designed to stimulate skinhead brutalities.”
On a certain level Frankel’s criticism of the magazine as a source of some of the vilest prose in America was not totally off base. The porn industry, tolerant as it was of personal eccentricities like drug addiction and certain types of criminality, was also cruel and exploitative to the core. The meanness of the industry was reflected in Hustler. In the pages of the magazine readers were referred to as “jack-offs,” adult performers as “sluts” and “bitches.” The rating system for films was based on a scale whose highest honor was a “Fully Erect” and whose lowest was a “Totally Limp.” Gallows humor prevailed among the staff. During my stay with the Aryan Nations I fell out of contact with my boss, MacDonell, for several days. He feared the worst. But when I showed up alive and in one piece, he expressed disappointment. He would be unable to print the headline for my obituary that he had planned, based on the film-rating scale: “Evan Wright: Totally Dead.”
Mainstream publications had scant interest in assigning work to a Hustler editor, but after more than a year of my pressing Glenn Kenny at Premiere, he agreed to hire me to write an article on the 1998 Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Shortly before I was supposed to leave for the show, Kenny called to inform me that the article had been reassigned to David Foster Wallace.
Kenny was certain I would understand and even expressed the hope