Gone Lawn 6 : Zack Kopp

Today, of course, Hal Blare is one of the most recognized and adored celebrities in the world, and certainly the most influential. His radio show, book and album, all released in the three years since his conviction and imprisonment, have shaken up the media landscape more significantly than the combined output of any other American artist in history. He has twice appeared as a centerfold in Playgirl magazine, and three times successfully negotiated the release of hostages when official diplomacy proved ineffective. Today's newscasts are little more than sensationalistic sound-poems produced in emulation of the fragmentary style of his writing and widely-syndicated nightly radio broadcasts. He is also a convicted serial killer, and one of the most evil and dangerous men in the history of American crime, if not the whole of human history. The seven murders masterminded by 'Doctor' Hal Blare and carried out by his staff of crazed, scalpel-swinging 'interns' are among the most gruesome on record. Blare's victims were literally cut to shreds. The decimated corpses were then devoured by the killers, the crushed bones being used for salt. Described by his critics as an "armchair Frankenstein," Blare saw himself as a medical scientist carrying out 'surgical strikes' to eliminate a form of societal cancer, namely, the banking industry. This book is an assortment of thought on Hal Blare from various and disparate sources, including Blare's own writings and transcripts of the perplexing, image-packed "bulletins" he broadcast from prison at the height of his popularity.

J.T. Bosworth, ed.

Without this information you will die in a world you never understood and be reborn to another still more puzzling. It will happen again and again. You will never again be as close to the truth as you are at this moment.

In the spring of 1999, when Hal Blare was twenty-seven years old, the media was dominated by reports of NATO's prolonged. bungled bombing campaign against the Serbs and editorials on how to spot and correct a pathological tendency to violence in your teen. The Baby Boomers, who had always opposed censorship, were forced into a defensive position by those who claimed it was the influence of recording artists like Marilyn Manson that had driven teens Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to commit the murders at Columbine. The Boomers, who, as a demographic group, had the highest involvement in media-related jobs at the time, were driven first to abash themselves publicly for the sins of the Love Generation, for "letting the children down," and then to hastily evolve a platform that was almost fascistic in its conservatism. And for the next ten years, the media reflected their crisis of conscience.

The Control Rangers Super Control Hour is perhaps the most obvious example of this trend. A group of patriotic athletes from a small-town high school, the Control Rangers had been gifted by benevolent aliens with superhero suits and martial arts skills with which to wreak havoc on enemies of the state. The show featured anti-drug spots alternating with the Rangers' adventures. The spots employed exclusionary slurs of a viciousness and insensitivity unmatched in the mainstream media since the days of segregation.

"People who do drugs are bad people," the Control Rangers told us. "They don't deserve your friendship. Do what you know in your heart is right. The Control Rangers do a good job of keeping everything under control . . . but only You . . . can Control Yourself!" Propaganda pushing a dualistic wartime state of mind filled the airwaves: shows about police who fought against crime, soldiers who fought invading aliens, computer hackers who fought the government, kids who fought against kids who used drugs. Until Hal Blare came along. At first, his story seemed to fill a natural role in the Baby Boomers' antagonistic projection of reality: he was an obvious and definite villain, an evil and insane man who had done bizarre and horrible things on prescription drugs and wouldn't deny it or say he was sorry. At first, he was condemned and abandoned. Then a strange thing happened.

Never for a single moment at any point in Blare's televised trial did he admit the slightest expression of remorse for his crimes, but the world fell in love with the forthright and pleasant demeanor he displayed throughout the proceedings. Movie and TV offers poured in by the hundreds, letters and cards by the hundreds of thousands. He managed to win the outspoken support of viewers all over the world on the strength of his personality alone. As Blare himself put it in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, "In an envy-based culture like ours, some people, when you point the camera at 'em, they're just ready, you know, they become stars. And I'm one of those people. A guy like me, he's a seed. Put him in front of a camera and he'll GROW."

Hal Blare's effect on the media is for the most part still misunderstood by the general public. With his sharp, sweet "bulletins" as he calls them, he has reinstated a standard of imagination and vitality to a field that had become little more than a mouthpiece for the establishment polemic. Hal Blare has been called the Savior of the media, more powerful today as a tool of cultural enforcement than ever before in any previous age, and by default, Hal Blare is the greatest cultural Savior the world has ever known.

Blare interviewed about his "bulletins" on KMPK FM

Kennedy "Skeletor" Haynes, fellow inmate with Blare in maximum security prison

"What most people don't understand about the Bulletins, man, Hal Blare's Bulletins, is that he literally wrote them to save the world . . . in his own mind, see, he's not just writing these little things, you know, he's like raging against the clock to save the whole rotten world. He said that was the whole point of it, writing the bulletins, getting that vision down. See, he had this idea that if he died in his writing first, he could keep the whole world from dying with him. He thought the whole world was gonna die at the same time he did. He also told me the reason a war had never been fought on American soil was that all that energy was channeled into the media and allowed to take its most extreme form there instead, and spare the people any physical catastrophe.

"'My point exactly.' He said it was all a top-secret project made possible by a conspiracy of top-level Masonic alchemists and all the big studio execs. He told me he'd done years of research. I never thought of Hal Blare as anything but a harmless kook. I mean, you could just walk up to him and be like, 'Fuck you, punk'; you know?"

The cold stars clicking their claws together like crabs in a tank. History changes and runs off the page like butter. Stars twirl over the stinking trenches, a subtle, magnetic resurrection that will take all time and never end. The Earth has us, and we multiply. Founded in an impulse of wild lonely need, not serious planning. Let this life not be a torment. Let the stars stop shaking. Please, God. I will turn my greatest tricks for you.

Zack Kopp is a freelance writer who currently edits and writes for the webzine MightyMercury and reviews books and conduct interviews of authors for The Examiner in Denver while singing and playing rhythm guitar in the skiffle-ska-soul-esque outfit Smart Rats and waiting for a couple of short story collections to be released. Kopp holds an MFA in Blah Blah Omega from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is writing his fantastic biography as it occurs. Says he's not sure what form it's gonna take, this big shift we're undergoing now, but there are fools who would deny it.