An excerpt from Chapter 12

I accidentally stole some of the stylings of Forrest Gump

Attention internet men:

If any of you reading this also see me on YouTube or Twitter (X), or you’re up to date on this growing pile of Substack articles, you’ve probably heard me mention once or twice that I’m slowly getting around to pissing out a generic manosphere book. Mostly just as practice. I have a few ideas for real books - fiction books actually - but I want to learn the dirty ins and outs of how to turn scribbles from my keyboard into something on people’s Kindle apps before I try my hand at a real book.

I’m something like 185 pages into this thing, and every time I go back and reread what I’ve written, I think I’m a long-winded blowhard pontificating about boring topics whose writing style is terrible to parse. But this is just my practice book anyway. They say the average self-published niche book sells fewer than 12 copies. I’m aiming even lower!

So anyway, I’m currently in the middle of Chapter 12, which delves into a parallel, I didn’t really think about until well into the book: Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump is a 1994 movie about a retarded man and his naive and simpleton takes on the 1951-1981 era in the United States. A period of great change in the world, as viewed through the eyes of a mentally retarded man.

I realized that this entire book I’ve been working on focuses on the 1997-2024 era in the United States. The internet age. A period of great change in the world, as viewed through the eyes of someone even more retarded: some extremist internet misogynist who calls himself Archwinger.

__________

“Forrest Gump” is a 1994 film, based on a 1986 novel (because Hollywood needs original ideas like a fish needs a bicycle), that follows the life of a mentally retarded man from Alabama that unfortunately shares his name with the title of the movie. While classified as a comedy-drama, there were a lot of layers to this movie, and a lot of social commentary delivered in what was considered to be a very creative way for the time. It won six academy awards and was nominated for many more.

Starring Tom Hanks as the titular role, who did a remarkable job, the story follows the life of Forrest Gump from 1951-1981, recounting the story of this iconic time period in the United States, as viewed through the eyes and mind of a retarded man.

Forrest is born with a curved spine and requires corrective leg braces as a youth to walk properly. He spends his school life being bullied due to both his physical and mental disabilities. Meanwhile, his single mom has to have sex with the school principal to get him into a regular educational curriculum, and rents the house to countless tenants to help make ends meet. While in school he meets a girl named Jenny, the only person who’s the slightest bit nice to him, and through his retarded eyes and mind, concludes that her father must love her a whole lot the way he’s always touching and kissing her. Yup. Childhood sexual abuse, as viewed through the eyes of a mentally retarded man.

Once his legs and spine miraculously heal, Forrest learns that he’s a supremely fast runner while outrunning bullies, and despite being retarded, he gets to go to college on a football scholarship because he’s so darn fast. After graduating college, he gets talked into joining the army because army recruitment propaganda works really well on the mentally retarded.

Gump goes through basic training with hilarious results, because it turns out he’s the ideal military grunt who mindlessly follows instructions and does what he’s told without asking any questions or complaining. He then gets deployed to Vietnam where his best friend Bubba (who is black) and many members of his unit are killed in an ambush. Being good at running, he runs into the jungle and drags many of his wounded comrades back to safety, including his commanding officer who loses both of his legs. He receives the Medal of Honor for his heroics.

The entire Vietnam arc of Forrest Gump’s story once again does a delightful job of telling the tale of military service and the horrors of war with a certain naive and child-like innocence. For Gump, war is just doing what you’re told to do, and a lot of running.

Upon his return, Gump ends up smack in the middle of the hippie anti-war and civil rights movements, runs into Jenny who has been living the hippie lifestyle of a lot of sex, drugs, and left-wing politics, makes some money as a ping-pong star because hitting a ball with a paddle with intense focus is easier when you’re retarded, and uses his ping-pong money to retire to the countryside and start a shrimping business.

There are a lot of colorful events thrown in. Gump’s commanding officer, minus two legs, becomes his right-hand man in the shrimping business after making his peace with God and his condition, invests in Apple before it was a thing, and the two become rich. Being naïve and retarded, Gump’s comments about money are that it’s good to have one less thing to worry about. Gump sends money to his dead best friend Bubba’s mom since the shrimping business was Bubba’s idea, and now Bubba’s mom has a white woman waiting on her. Yup. Racism and the civil rights era as seen through the eyes of a retarded man.

Every event large and small is narrated on or acted around with the same naïve and child-like takes that only a man of diminished capacity who just doesn’t quite understand everything could present. But at the same time, these child-like takes distil complex events into simple ideas. The juxtaposition of a serious scene, like the Vietnam war or a Black Panther meeting, next to a simple man doing the shuttle run while getting shot in the butt or decking an abusive boyfriend of his love interest in the middle of a room full of armed and angry black men, is both comedic and dramatic, and definitely gets the audience chuckling.

The movie culminates with Jenny, a shadow of her former self after years of drugs and prostitution, infected with some kind of terminal illness, showing up at Gump’s doorstep. He proposes to her, and while the internet manosphere would have a heyday about this over-sexed woman showing up at her rich male friend’s house to con him into a relationship that benefits her, let’s remember that this guy is literally retarded. Nobody expects the actually-retarded man to call the only person who’s ever been nice to him a slut to her face and send her packing.

This scene takes place in the 1970s. There’s no internet manospehre to turn Gump into an uncouth extremist yet. His simple take on this complex situation goes something like “I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is”. The two have sex and she leaves the next morning. She reappears years later with a toddler she says is his, they get married, she dies from her illness, and Gump, the now-single father and his kid, Forrest Junior, live out their lives. Fin.

In 1994 when Forrest Gump hit the theaters, we didn’t have the internet in the homes yet. People still watched TV shows at night, went to the movie theater to see movies before they were available anywhere else, and knew that history didn’t begin in 2002. In fact, while I was just starting high school that year, my parents were still young enough to enjoy movies. I’d even go so far as to say they were as much if not more the target audience of this movie than my generation. My parents actually grew up in the Forrest Gump era.

My mom was a hippie-lite. She didn’t skip school and take a giant van all over the country using drugs and having sex with strangers. She went to college. Nursing school, too. But she wore flowery skirts with hair down past her butt, platform sandals, and had a lot of boyfriends. So she was hippie-style, but mostly just because it was trendy. In fact, entirely because it was trendy. I’m going to assume anybody who’s on page 180-or so of this book did not skip any chapters, so I’ll just briefly remind you that, per a few chapters ago, my mom’s very likely an undiagnosed narcissist and my therapist wife agrees.

My parents and my in-laws live in the same city. The last time we drove in to visit, we made arrangements with my ex-wife to drop our daughter off at my in-laws’ house because she was passing through in the other direction. When my mom got wind of this arrangement she … get this … called my ex-wife and started questioning her about why she was dropping our child off there and if I was the one responsible for the arrangement. When we arrived at my parents’ house – bringing them breakfast mind you – she then tried to chew me out about how angry she was about this. When a person only sees the world through a lens of how things affect them, this is a fairly normal thought process. You get used to it when they’re your parent.

I just brushed this off and redirected the conversation, because this is just what my mother is like, and while I could yell at her about how inappropriate she’s been and make her cry, there’s no winning resolution where anybody’s life changes for the better at the end of that conversation. It’s just a huge waste of energy doing something supremely irritating, all to obtain a completely negative result.

Naturally, that means this was a very important issue to my wife, who wanted to make sure I made my mother understand very clearly that this was inappropriate and was not to happen again.

I’ll fast forward through all of the who-said-what-when play-by-play and just conclude that our visit to my parents’ house included my wife yelling at my mother and my mother wondering what the heck is wrong with my wife and why she’s being so unreasonable. My mom concluded that my wife must be jealous of my ex-wife and that’s why she’s acting like this. We brought Chick-fil-a to my parents’ house for breakfast, though, and their breakfast burrito is pretty good. Not as good as the breakfast tacos you usually have to order in Spanish from the gas station near my house, but still okay.

Any time my wife acts irritated about any aspect of that visit, I comment about breakfast as though that was the most important thing that happened. Because it was.

My dad might have been slightly hippie-style as well, based on a few of his stories. But he ended up getting drafted to serve in Vietnam. Before the army could snatch him up, he signed up for the Navy instead since we have some naval history on his side of the family. He made it through officer training but was discharged due to a defect in one of his ears, so he never served in Vietnam. A lot of people he went through training with died.

One time during training, an instructor was teaching some close-combat techniques and asked my dad to come at him. When Dad made his move, the guy threw him, then turned back to address the other soldiers. Dad got up and jumped the guy from behind. The guy threw him again, laughed, told him to get his ass back with the group, but that he liked his style. I wish I knew that guy. It sounds like Dad used to be fun.

Some of Dad’s funnier stories come from a trip he took to Morocco when he was a young PhD student doing research there.

One night, he pitched the group’s tent on a scorpion nest, felt one crawling on his leg while he was sleeping, instinctively swatted it somehow without getting stung, heard the crunch noise, realized what was going on, and got the whole group up in the middle of the night to move the tent.

Another time, he was taken in by the Moroccan police who suspected he was spying for someone and kept demanding to know who he was working for. At the time, he had hair down to his shoulders, and every time he tried to explain himself, the police officer would slap him across the face and declare “Hippie you lie!” Eventually, one of his friends who was close with the local authorities came and got him out of custody. He got a haircut the next day.

One time, his jeep was driving up a tiny one-lane mountain road and had to pull over for like half an hour. He asked the driver what was happening, and apparently Mick Jagger was visiting the country around that time and his limo was coming down the mountain in the other direction. They had to pull over because “Monsieur Jagger” did not want to wait any longer. While passing Dad’s jeep, Jagger rolled the window of his limo down and gave my Dad the bird.

So you’re reading the words of the descendent of a man who was flipped off by the great Mick Jagger.

Dad went on to get his PhD, rise through the ranks as a geologist for as long as his age would let him, and did pretty okay career-wise. He ran marathons, too, until his knees started to go. Now he hobbles around on a cane, stumbles through his words trying to figure out how to say things, and has bad dementia. Any time past 4:00 P.M. (1600 for you military people or people who live in countries that don’t like the A.M./P.M. system), you’re lucky if he knows what’s going on when you talk to him.

I can’t say that I have any idea what to do in that situation other than just be there when we’re able to.

My grandfather on my father’s side had dementia as well. The last time I saw him was when we buried my grandmother. I was a pall-bearer at her funeral. I wasn’t able to make it up for grandpa’s funeral which happened a few months later. Anyway, Grandpa kept asking where his wife was, and every time someone told him, he’d break down and start crying. Fifteen minutes later, he’d ask where his wife was again. Obviously, we stopped tormenting him over and over and just started telling him she had gone out each time he asked.

That trip for Grandma’s funeral was my daughter’s first trip on a plane. My grandparents lived in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin. We landed in Minneapolis, rented a car, and had to drive around in the snow. Naturally, I got pulled over driving from the airport through nowhere-ville Wisconsin, but the cop let me off with a warning when I told him we were in the state to bury my grandmother. It was so cold that when we went to eat at what passes for the best restaurant in Spooner, Wisconsin (population 2,573 as of 2020), by the time we made it back out to the car, the water in my daughter’s sippy-cup we left in her car seat cupholder was frozen solid, which really pissed her off and she whined the whole way back to the hotel.

Anyway, given my dad and my grandpa’s respective dementias, my genetics are pretty fucked. Every time my hand shakes a little bit when I’m doing something that requires fine motor skills, I wonder if that’s normal because what I’m doing is hard, or if I’m on the same road as my dad and grandfather.

But that’s not where I was going with any of this.

My point was that in 1994, hippie-style parents who grew up in the 1951-1981 era where Forrest Gump takes place were probably the target audience for the movie. Not my generation. My parents’ generation actually remembers the Vietnam war and the civil rights era and has feelings about all of that, and chuckled louder than I did at the naïve and absolutely retarded takes of Forrest Gump on these major world events.

Forrest Gump is the critique of a simpleton on the significant, and often formative, events that occurred during the lives of my parents’ generation.

A lot has changed since 1994. In fact, this very book you are reading now begins with the premise that the presence of the internet in the homes of nearly every human, circa 1997, was the start of a new area. The internet age. And from 1997-2024, the world has been changing at a breakneck pace as humanity figures out its new normal in a world where the internet is at everybody’s fingertips any time they want.

It's looking like the next era is going to be the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where the ability to obtain any information, any written work product, any image, any audio, any video, all generated on-the-fly at your request based on how good of a prompt you provide to a machine learning model, is going to change the way humans perform pretty much every kind of work we currently do. But I’ll leave writing that book to you. By the time we’ve lived enough years in that era to write a book, I’ll be old. Hopefully of sound mind. But old.

Ironically, if AI had existed in 1994, the production team for Forrest Gump would have had a much easier time with some of the cobbled-together scenes that stitch Tom Hanks into old footage, such as one showing Gump with President Kennedy, and as part of various other historical events.

Anyway, this book turned into a Forrest Gump style book as I was writing it, but about the internet age instead of hippies. And a book instead of a movie, though the Gump movie was based on a novel. You might summarize this book as themes and events from 1997-2024, seen through the eyes of somebody even more simple-minded and more retarded than Forrest Gump: a misogynistic internet personality who calls himself Archwinger.

So I guess this book is the critique of a simpleton on the significant, and possibly formative, events of the internet age.

As an aside, being a simpleton is apparently very difficult. John Travolta was the original choice to play the character of Forrest Gump but passed on the role, which he later concluded was a mistake. Sean Penn was the second choice, but he also passed. After just 90 minutes of reading the script, Tom Hanks was sold on the idea and signed on to the film. But it still took him three full days of producing completely unusable footage before he finally learned how to play the role and start generating decent scenes. In some fun nepotistic acts, Tom Hanks’ brother Jim was hired as his acting double for some of the more physical scenes, and his daughter Elizabeth has a small speaking part early in the movie.

The writer of the novel upon which the movie was based commented that the movie adaptation takes all of the “rough edges” off of the character. I suppose, if we look at this Gump character through the lens of the internet manosphere, that’s a fairly accurate assessment. He doesn’t have a single rough edge. Gump is the nicest most pure human you will ever meet, who is kind and generous, works hard even when there’s no personal gain just because he’s supposed to, takes risks and makes sacrifices for others with no expectation of return, just because he’s supposed to – and magically, everything works out for Gump in his life. He ends up rich, a celebrated hero, eventually gets the girl, even has a family. And he was literally born with both physical and mental disabilities, into poverty, raised by a single mom, and succeeded despite idiocy simply through hard work and a little bit of good luck.

I suppose the Gump story could be considered the boomer movie version of the American Dream. A man who isn’t that special and is dealt a bad hand by life picks himself up by his bootstraps, takes every opportunity he crosses, makes the most of them, works very hard, and ends up rich, successful, and happy in the end.

The Gump story could also be considered the iconic internet manosphere warning tale. Young Gump is an unattractive man. Physically disabled, mentally retarded, socially awkward, poor family, no fatherly influence – only a single mother, no friends, limited potential. The only friend he’s able to make is a sexually abused girl from another poor family. She likes Gump just fine – as a friend – but eventually runs off with a hippie guy to go live a life of sex and drugs. Meanwhile, Gump does his duty and joins the army, serves his country, performs admirably, and receives a round piece of metal and a bullet in the ass for his accomplishments.

Once home, Gump runs into his lady friend, who is still very busy with drugs, sex, and counter-culture involving rooms full of black men. She’s happy to catch up, but can’t get rid of Gump fast enough when he starts to crimp her style and make problems with the guy she’s currently sleeping with.

Years later, through a lot of hard work and some dumb-ass luck, Gump is rich. Suddenly, Jenny, the love of his life, is at his doorstep. She’s a little worn out from her sex and drugs escapades, but now she wants to hang out in Gump’s nice house with Gump’s nice money. Even then, she finds his love smothering and eventually leaves, only to return four or five years later to dump the child she’s been raising as a single mother into Gump’s financial care before she dies.

Some people seeing Gump’s story may see an inspiring tale, others just some slapstick comedy. Some may see the boomer American dream of a man with nothing succeeding through hard work. Some may see a cautionary tale of a man too dumb to avoid having his heart broken by a troubled woman time and time again.