Istvan Bio 11
Let's workshop this author bio (straight from Miami)
Poppa, provocateur, poet, philosopher, professor, producer of music and comedy, patriarch of Safe Space Press, peddler of preworn panties, product of Beacon, NY—M. A. Istvan Jr. has long held high Bukowski’s torch to curb our nation’s Mickey-Mouse infestation. His resolve has never wavered despite the disheartening smell of mouse droppings that has intensified to the point where our culture manages to be, by some magic, sanitized and saccharine (think: Beach Boys and Leave it to Beaver) even in its hypersexual music, even in its celebration of indigenous trans fats—these all aligned with the status quo, like cigarettes in the 1950s or tattooed arm sleeves in the present, and so ultimately cheap, safe, and superficial forms of boundary pushing (as fake as Korean public weeping).
In recent years, Istvan has corralled most of his resources toward pushing back against one of the most virulent and insidious expressions—weapons—of the Disneyfication tide: cancel culture, that iron-maiden kangaroo-court ethos of censoring, silencing, and shaming even artists and professors accused—merely accused—of being perpetrators of “wrong think” and “unsettling attitudes” and “problematic sentiments.” It is crucial, Istvan feels, that resistance to this ethos of DEI-xenophobia come especially from those marginal groups it weaponizes, those groups whose purported “vulnerability” serves as a pretense to rid the world of whatever is triggering—well, whatever counts as triggering for those whom the right identities declare not to be infected with “the multiracial disease of whiteness.” Istvan recognizes the difficulty merely of seeing the need to resist, let alone of risking job loss and social alienation by participating in the resistance. Because of its feel-good pandering to superficial foreignness (think: the black dike—arm-sleeved, of course—who makes life decisions based on her zodiac sign and whose stance on every political issue you can figure out by knowing her stance on just one), it is easy to overlook its tremendous power to deepen our hatred of more substantial foreignness (think: those daring to express themselves in ways that violate pc norms).
This piece is unpublished