Of course, the Eighties have some bearing on the present world. The demise of organized labor, the decline of real wages, and the diminution of consumer industries faced with third world outsourcing; the primacy of finance and the shift toward mass incarceration justified by draconian drug laws; the negative trade balances, federal deficits, and tax cuts evened out by massive foreign purchases of Treasury bonds—these interlinked phenomena form the basis of contemporary governance, and even casual political historians today know how they were first ramped up during the Eighties, and by whom. But our good materialist perspective of the Eighties may be too exact, too sure. The uniform, relentless quality of neoliberal policies as applied once the Nineties began is projected back onto their pivotal decade; the shaky and experimental elements of the eventual consensus in its fledgling years have been effaced by the foreknowledge of its universal triumph.

For all his mordant skepticism regarding the motives, tactics, speech acts, capabilities, and apparel of the Sixties left, DeLillo had always taken seriously its assertion that US society as it actually existed was indistinguishable from the ideal of an exceptionally prosperous and long-lived fascism. It’s no more a coincidence that “Hitler studies” is housed in the same campus building as the department of “American environments” than it was that the Nazis modeled their rallies on American football games, their race laws on American apartheid, or their geopolitics on American frontier expansion. One man’s Nazi German theory is another’s white American practice, and both of these men are Jack Gladney. What surges forth in Jack’s experience of the nation—college gatherings glimpsed as upscale fascist rallies, reading Mein Kampf at the Dinky Donut while his wife and her ex-husband catch up—is far from a call for political counterforce. It’s a profile of the supine human spirit framed as a taxonomy of language, overdubbed by an anthology of whiteness framed as a catalog of noise. The commercial gabble and the misremembered trivia, the portentous lectures and the genocidal shrieks, the desperate love, the still more desperate phobias, the murderous aggression phrased in balancing accounts and Heideggerian cant, the accented rants of the nuns without faith like oneself: where do they all lead one, if not toward death? However, in centering his existential narrative on Gladney’s spongelike consciousness, DeLillo is conducting, perhaps inadvertently, psychological tests with political undertones.

Some time after, not long, at the same Barnes and Noble, I chose to read White Noise. One year later I owned all his books and suspected I was meant to be a writer. Literature, I found, was like a high school. Certain people hang out with each other; there is gossip and grades. I read The Corrections and Infinite Jest; I read Pynchon from V up to Gravity’s Rainbow. Perusing the internet, I discovered that these books were called “systems novels” (because they were about the System); that certain critics greeted “systems novels” with vituperation; that certain critics liked them and aspired to be their authors. These people, of course, were all white, were all part of a system, but what can you do? Time comes for us all. Not everything cool or important remains as it is. The literary culture of the Aughts would dissipate, as if to say: Keep working and engaging and the tide will turn. The best words care for something other than mere coolness, and they always win out in the end—remember Melville, Faulkner, Ellison, DeLillo, Morrison.

The artists of the Eighties acted fast. They had to: there would be no future otherwise. But in battling the retrograde Reaganite look of the System, they knew they were its bastards nonetheless. They took on organized religion by altering its iconography, not destroying it. Consensus uncoolness, delivered through media, was countered by coolness more media-fluent. Faced with dead forms, they formed live ones in their image. You, too, have become a zombie; all the more reason to dance better than the others. I’m a government man. I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. The evil Frank Booth, in Blue Velvet, looks straight at the camera: “You’re like me,” he says. You’re part of what you fight: it’s the acceptance of this fact that breathes a spirit of unsqueamishness, engagement, and humility—the beauty of a dark truth brought to light—into the best art of the flagrant Eighties.

As if in compensation for how politics today amounts to little more than slow-mo sumo between liberal and reactionary capitalist parties, people have more access to great art than ever. The problem, however, is that we possess more Jack Gladneys than ever as well. Jack is a creature constituted by his insecurities, and neoliberalism means nothing if not insecurity for all. After many decades of the white man in America losing ground—in society quite slowly, in culture much faster—DeLillo’s latent archetype, his patient zero of American secular fascism, has spawned into real life, is becoming a nation of millions. Jack’s ludicrous symptoms, his ghoulish temptations now grow ever more common and prominent. His fantasies of a transcendent death, framed as the closing shots of a TV biography of Attila the Hun, are moronic; yet insipid holograms of a historical fantasy held up as glorious ideals (the Bronze Age, Tolkien, traditionalist Catholicism, the cold war) are intellectual currency in general circulation now. “Not everyone spoke English at the cash terminals, or near the fruit bins and frozen foods, or out among the cars in the lot”—coming from a late-middle-aged Hitler scholar terrified of his impending permanent demise, this already encapsulated, decades in advance, the future politics of neoliberal immigration. Jack’s unwarranted wariness in front of Asian kids, professionals, and industrial products is absurd; still, it presages all the envious, whinging hostility toward “the Chinese” typical of fascist ideologues today. (Why can’t we have an efficient dictator to battle theirs?) It’s beyond preposterous when Jack attempts to take shelter from his own inadequacies by kneeling at the image of a garrulous secular racist celebrity who’s also a historically proven, capital-L Loser. Fashioning facsimiles of cool through allusions to Nazi insignia. Reconciling liberty and structure through sadistic plots. Blending faith and secular identity in a materialist cult of personality. Hiding from death by inflicting it. It’s all too hysterical to make up real life, and still part of our world.