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When I was twelve I began dreaming of joining the Black Panthers and waging war on white America after I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. That same year I heard the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." and was immediately down with the British working class struggle against whatever it was that was oppressing them.  I loved rebellion, and it didn't matter if there wasn't one exactly tailored to a white kid from a semi-rural part of Ohio. I would make the ones at hand fit. My rebelliousness eventually led to my incarceration in a facility for problem juveniles, and then to my running away.

It was only after I put Hella Nation together that I realized most of my subjects are runaways of one sort or another, from the anarchist kids of "Wingnut's Last Day on Earth" to the couple profiled in "Mad Dogs and Lawyers" who fled their staid lives as San Francisco attorneys to become involved with a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. Even though my own attempt to run away led to personal catastrophe, I still have a feeling for those who are attempting to make the break.

Even as a twelve-year-old, I sensed that my yearning to become a militant Black Panther was not only doomed but ludicrous. At the same time, the call of rebellion was intoxicating. For this reason, I am drawn to rebels of all types, however doomed, ridiculous or even reprehensible the cause. I like rebel stories because for a time at least, I'm able to go on the road to revolution, and at the end of it go home.

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"Wingnut's Last Day on Earth," my account of radical anarchists who protested the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, was the first story I was ever assigned that was extensively covered on television. The anarchists themselves provided the necessary photogenic imagery by dressing in militant uniforms of black hoodies and masks, then smashing windows of Starbucks and other chainstores in Seattle. The media loves a riot. As I recount in Hella Nation, I could not get the story assigned until anarchists destroyed some property in front of news cameras.

In writing prose, it's always a struggle to create a narrative. So many details can remain contradictory even after the most vigorous reporting and research that culling out a cohesive and meaningful sequence of events is often a challenge. This was the case with the Seattle riots. 

Television news reporters have it easier insofar as images automatically create a narrative in a viewer's mind. The problem is, the image-driven narrative may not be accurate. In the case of the Seattle riots, televised images of rampaging anarchists told a false story. Most viewers assumed the anarchists started the riots. Having witnessed the event first-hand, as well as interviewed participants, it became clear that police instigated much of the violence, and ironically created the chaos which allowed the anarchists the freedom to begin their destructive rampage.

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I had a high opinion of the mainstream media when I worked at Hustler magazine. I recognized that what we produced at Hustler was mostly garbage, and believed that what was published in serious newspapers and magazines was both truthful and beneficial to the greater good. Journalistically speaking, I had low self-esteem.  My perception changed when I went to for Seth Warshavsky's Internet Entertainment Group, the subject of chapter nine, "Portrait of a Con Artist."  I'm not saying necessarily that my self esteem rose. But my esteem for the mainstream press plunged enough that eventually everything came into alignment, and I stopped comparing my work to that of all other journalists affiliated with respected institutions.

When I started working for Warshavsky he was a highly-regarded figure in the media.  The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and others hailed him as a visionary, a young man who had bested much larger enterprises by pioneering e-commerce. It didn't matter that he was a purveyor of "adult content." He was an innovator and besides, he reassured the press that porn was a stepping stone. Soon, he would turn his business into the Viacom of the Internet. 

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Hella Nation is about a free country.  As a child, when I used to see the Wild West depicted in movies it seemed an ideal American fantasy: a wide open place where anyone could escape from civilization and re-invent himself. In fiction, the frontier was filled mostly with outlaws, swindlers and the odd cultist group, and nefarious as they were they seemed to affirm the absolute freedom of the place. When I was forced to read Huck Finn in middle school, riverboat con artists like the Duke and the King immediately became my favorite characters. Coming of age as I did in an era of mini-malls, corporate rock, anti-smoking laws, and anxiety about children playing with cap guns, it seemed that the days of a wide-open, lawless frontier America had long ago passed.

But when I began to fit the pieces together that make Hella Nation--travels and essays done largely along the West Coast (with one excursion with U.S. troops into the frontier of south Afghanistan) during the past decade--I was struck by the similarities between the actual Americans I have profiled in the present day, and the characters of the mythic West. From the outlaws, to the colorful swindlers, to the young men and women in uniform seeking to avenge 9/11 and bring back bin Laden dead or alive, the American frontier types remain very much alive. In the future, the current era will no doubt seem as violent, half-civilized and filled with as many improbable characters as the Old West appears to us. Hella Nation is filled with dark characters, but as I see them they also affirm that despite the best efforts of many, we remain a defiantly free and often totally untamed people.   

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Evan Wright is our guest blogger during the week of April 6th. If you have any questions for Evan Wright, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's War Against the GAP, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America.

From the award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author of Generation Kill, a reporter's immersion in outsider cultures-"His style owes more to Hunter S. Thompson than to any sort of political correctness" (Newsday).

From his work as a reporter at Hustler magazine, to his National Magazine Award-winning writing for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, Evan Wright has always had an affinity for outsiders-what he calls "the lost tribes of America." The previously published pieces in this collection chart a deeply personal journey, beginning with his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley, through his raw portrait of a Hollywood überagent-turned-war documentarian and hero of America's far right. Along the way, Wright encounters runaway teens earning corporate dollars as skateboard pitchmen; radical anarchists plotting the overthrow of corporate America; and young American troops on the hunt for terrorists in the combat zones of the Middle East. His subjects are people for whom the American dream is either just out of grasp, or something they've chosen to reject altogether. Sometimes frightening, usually profane, and often darkly comic, Hella Nation is Evan Wright's meticulously observed tour of the jagged edges of all those other Americas hiding in plain sight amid the nation's malls and gated communities. The collection also includes an all-new, autobiographical introductory essay by the author.