Book Excerpt: Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, by Tom Lutz, published 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY
Page 281-282:
"Repent! Quit your job!! REPENT!" the photocopied pamphlet declares. A crazy hodgepodge of typefaces, graphics, sidebars, inserts, and boxes, the flyer looks like the back pages of a comic book from the 1950s. "Are you abnormal?" it asks. "THEN YOU ARE PROBABLY BETTER THAN MOST PEOPLE." Something called the Church of the SubGenius seems to be the author, and whoever they are, they would like your money. As far as one can make out, the Church's belief system boils down to this schematic:
The Goal: SLACK
The Method: The Casting Out Of False Prophets
The Weapon: Time Control
The Motto: Fuck Them If They Can't Take A Joke
Satire, hoax, Dada-esque art project, science fiction, and parody religious cult, the Church published its first scripture (this pamphlet) in 1980. It and subsequent pamphlets were a hit on the underground comics circuit and were then expanded into The Book of the SubGenius, published by McGraw Hill in 1983. The Church continues to run its Web site, selling mugs, T-shirts, and ordinations. It is also at the senter of several very active Usenet groups and radio programs, and it sponsors live shows, although, like most slacker events, these are somewhat sparsely attended.
Slack, the The Book of the SubGenius declares, is both the natural state of human beings and the highest attainable state of enlightenment, like nirvana. "For Slack comprises the Universe. It is the Logos, the Tao, the Wor, the Ain Soph of the Qabbala." Mere physical slack, the scripture warns, can be dangerous, leading to impotence. True slack, on the contrary, "somehow manages to be a great Motive without slapping the sleed-limit of Death on the Road.: It is "a surge of gumption, an explosion of the 'self' -- not obliterating it, but bloating it." Very much like the eighteenth-century lounger, then, the SubGenius is someone who is both completely absolved of worldly success, ironically aloof from all bourgeois desires, and clearly protesting too much his own superiority. And taking the lounger's wink one step further, the SubGenius announces his own auto-befuddlement through the scripture's self-help slogans. "Relax in the safety of your own delusions," the scriptures exhort. "Pull the wool over your own eyes." The fact that the pose has a commercial motive is alluded to regularly as well: a graphic, for instance, shows a left-wing ranter and a right-wing ranter havng their wallets plucked simultaneously by a SubGenius. "There's a whole market, a type of person there's no word for. I want 'SubGenius' to be that word," says "Bob," the Church's deity. Elsewhere he says, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." Perhaps more than any other proponent of slackerism before or since, the Church of the SubGenius recognizes its own complicity in suspect commerce -- recognizes and admits, winking all the while, that it is, in fact, primarily selling a fantasy, and one that it doesn't itself believe.