DISDAIN FOR FAT PLEBS: THE "PATRICK BATEMAN" RIGHT

"Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?"

by Andy Nowicki

Patrick Bateman is a now legendary anti-hero, first depicted in Bret Easton Ellis’s excruciatingly hilarious and bleakly horrifying 1990 novel American Psycho, and brought to the screen a decade later in a career-making performance by Christian Bale. Unlike Bale’s more famous later cinematic incarnation, Bateman is no “dark knight,” but rather a deeply vain, vapid, and vacuous man with a killer smile, who also happens to be a serial killer.

Behind Bateman’s tailored designer suits lurks the murderously muscular frame of a sadistic psycho who butchers fellow humans for sport. But Bateman’s indulgences in ultraviolence aren’t nearly as disconcerting as the fact that within him there beats no “heart of darkness.” Instead, this dapper dimbulb appears to have no heart at all, and seemingly no mind, either. Soulless as a handsome storefront mannequin, Bateman is the sort of man who launches into expansive monologues about the musical genius of Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, and Whitney Houston, all the while abusing high-class whores in various unspeakable ways… His tortures and murders, however, are interspersed with moments of pure, inspired inanity. After ejaculating into the mouth of a freshly-dead woman whose head he’s removed with a chainsaw, he frets over the fact that his co-workers’ business cards are snazzier-looking than his; later, as he prepares to bludgeon a homeless man to death in an alley, he ponders what suit he ought to wear to an upcoming office party. Bateman lives for little more than status, and his motivation to kill stems less from rage and passion, and more from general disdain of those he considers to be beneath him.

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Today, among the diverse “alternative right” crowd, we find a certain contingent which seems to emulate Patrick Bateman’s overall philosophy and aesthetic outlook. What is Bateman, after all, if not a dumbed-down Nietzschian, who asserts his “will to power” and detests “slave morality”? Who is this photogenically brain-dead plunderer of life but a sort of reverse-Robin Hood, vampiric “Skeksi,”  remorselessly draining the essence of the repulsive “proles” to enrich his own vitality: an unrepentant Himmler-esque eugenicist who aims to root out “life unworthy of life” to assure the longevity of the master race’s rule?  

                                                     

The Skeksis were no plebs, that's for sure!

We see the values of the “Patrick Bateman” faction of the alt-right amply articulated in a recent Radix article by Paul Treitschke entitled “The Beautiful People.” Writing of the recent hubbub over comely ESPN reporterette Britt McHenry’s harsh dressing-down of a significantly less attractive low-level clerk of a towing company—over the course of which the shapely sideline girl taunts the hapless, huskily-built office drone for being ugly and for having a crappy job, among other things (the entirety of the rant was caught on tape, and resulted in McHenry receiving a one-week suspension from her job)—Treitschke comes out decidedly in favor of the hot, bitchy TV star over the un-hot, non-glamorous nobody whom she abused and humiliated.

Treitschke does not merely defend Miss McHenry in the manner that some other commentators have—by noting that she was undoubtedly frustrated with having her car towed for seemingly no good reason, and furthermore observing that the video footage of McHenry has, after all, been edited in such a manner that we don’t know what her interlocutor might have said to set her off on her nasty tirade. Nor is Treitschke content to point out the undeniable fact that many are inclined to hate on McHenry merely out of envy, because they resent her for being rich, pretty, and popular; a prototype (for women) of the girl they wish they were but can never be; or conversely (for men) of the sort of girl who’d never sleep with them in a million years, and wouldn’t hesitate to let them know of this fact.

                                                                            

Britt McHenry

No, our intrepidly edgy correspondent goes still further. McHenry is slim and attractive and the other woman is plump and homely; ergo—thus speaks Zara-Treitschke!—the former is an Uberfraulein worthy of adulation and worship while the latter is a contemptible “low-life” fit to be bullied by that same resplendent Uberfraulein who is, after all, her genetic and social better. To buttress this assertion, Treitschke tendentiously claims that:

Most ugly people are also ugly on the inside, and, in many ways, physical features are a reflection of lifestyle, personality, and character. Being a blonde bombshell says that person is healthy, positive, and makes good life decisions. On the other hand, being a fat ass reflects low willpower, low impulse control, and poor life decisions. The whole purpose of “inner beauty” is to subvert our ideas of real beauty and to comfort the dregs. It only exists deep in the minds of resentful pests and is a classic example of Nietzsche’s priestly morality at work.

Treitschke never explains just how he arrives at the calculation that “most ugly people are also ugly on the inside,” or why possession of physical beauty is an indication that one has made “good life decisions” or can otherwise be said to reflect well upon one’s “character.” But it’s just as well for him not to elaborate on these assertions, because one gets the impression that they are less carefully constructed arguments than statements expressing his devoutly-held first principles. The beautiful, strong, rich, famous, and haughty are simply, to his mind, good; the ugly, weak, poor nobodies are just plain bad. This is a matter “beyond good and evil,” as that gaudily-mustachioed horse-loving head case first wrote (with, one gathers shaky hand) more than a century ago.

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Most representatives of the “Patrick Bateman” faction of the alt-right don’t apply their criteria quite so crudely as Treitschke does in this spectacularly silly piece. Still, they are generally fueled by an aristocratic haughtiness, a“disdain for plebs.” One wonders, then, about their stance against the principalities and powers of our age. Why oppose power when power is strength and strength is inherently good?

In particular, given the realities of disproportionate Jewish power in our world, what sense does it make to embrace anti-Semitism, as the majority of the Bateman faction clearly do? If the Jews are in control, and the rest of us are goyishe “plebs” working for our hebe masters, then isn’t it a sign of a contemptible “slave morality” to want to throw off this yoke? Ought we not simply to sit by and allow ourselves to be ridiculed and abused by our “natural” rulers, who, according to writers like Treitschke, have every right to treat us however they see fit? Are we not rendering ourselves mere “resentful pests” for presuming to overturn the hierarchy that puts the Jews at the top? If we complain, aren’t we just like the “fat ass” lady who had the effrontery to object to being treated by Britt McHenry as the inferior she so clearly was?

(originally published at Alternative Right, April 2015)

Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. He occasionally updates his blog when the spirit moves him to do so. Visit his Soundcloud page.