Raging Boy

On Reading The Ugly

There is a story I used to tell to people who asked me why I study post-colonial theory. Sitting in my dorm room sometime in early 2014, I looked over the possible books that I could use to entertain myself while I ate my turkey sandwich. Looking for something light, I found myself staring at one thin text titled Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Though I had not read this particular book for some years, I had always loved Hunter S. Thompson's bizarre Gonzo style. However, when I cracked it open this day, I found that some of the joy had left this novel. Instead, I was left wondering: why is the traveller so privileged? What about those who are not in this position, who are off the road? This question later became my senior thesis, and marked a critical point in my academic development of beginning to criticize the work that I love. Previously coming from a background of studying archaic English novels, I had restricted myself to criticizing books that were far out of the registry of popular culture that I did not particularly identify with. But one can only analyze so many cobwebs before one turns to the spider at hand.

Deconstructing my beloved texts came to represent an exorcism of colonial ghosts, a selfish endeavor to determine if I could possibly justify enjoying the myths I had formed my identity around while simultaneously eviscerating them. How exactly does a young white man go about "fixing" his own personal canon, full of men disillusioned young men like him? As I grew older, this question became a sort of twisted autoethnography. If "ethnographic work requires not just a clear head but fire in the belly", then I possessed a mind clouded by the smoke from an all-consuming inferno (Boellstorff et al., 57). Down went Norman Maclean, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Milius, Jack London, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola; all found wanting.

In writing, I came to realize a truth: I do not claim to know 

Simply put, I do not feel like criticizing that which is Other to me is the most productive use of my time. As an aspiring post-colonial scholar, I have pored over texts about race, gender, sexuality, and hegemony more than the average bear. And yet, as an active participant in my own normative identity, I cannot begin to understand an identity outside of my own. So where does the desire to destroy go? Not toward that which is different from me, but toward that which is the same.

And here is where Logan Paul enters the framework. Paul is a year and half younger than me, takes pride in his semi-rural background like I do, and believes just as strongly in the myth of redemptive violence.

have the unique ability to come at the hegemony from the inside

As someone who has gotten paid more for using my body than my mind



powered by perverse desire to see the classics shown most often in dorm-room posters 

in my various subcultures. Wary of how "potentially risky research [can] expose an already vulnerable community", I made conscious choices to only strike 

Should he?

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