(Note: I could have just written SHITLIB a whole bunch of times.)

Spending two and a half hours with Henry Rollins isn’t a whole lot different from being cornered at a party by a motor-mouthed liberal arts student, albeit one with a side interest in Nietzsche and weight training. Planting himself on-stage and assuming the position of a man waiting to hear the starting pistol, Rollins chewed his way like a hardcore Will Rogers through a series of tangentially related stories from the last 12 months of his life. He didn’t pause for a second in his often wildly entertaining, if occasionally muddle-headed spoken-word performance at the Centre on Sunday night, apparently talking directly off the top of that machine-tooled noggin the entire time.

The former Black Flag front man is on tour to commemorate the final days of the Bush regime, which is already problematic if you’re not persuaded that one U.S. administration is significantly different from another. But at least it gave Rollins the chance to return fire on what he called the “low-balling McCain campaign”, levelling some cheaply amusing, if pointless, potshots at Sarah Palin.

“Forty-three years of age, five kids,” he barked. “That’s a lot of fucking!”

A brief bit on former deputy chief of staff Karl Rove’s resignation inspired the man’s imaginative gifts. “That’s the guy who used to arrange the words in Bush’s brain,” Rollins said. “And the words now roam lonely and lost across the vast intellectual landscape of George W. Bush’s mind, like lambs with the pen door open.” As pleasing as it is to hear the man verbally sucker-punch an idiot—and the three-quarters-full venue certainly did enjoy it—it also puts Rollins in the same category as Jon Stewart and America’s insurgent gang of Democratically aligned satirists and pundits who provide big laughs (or as cultural critic Lynn Crosbie wrote in the Globe and Mail recently, “louche mockery”), but little in the way of substantial insight.

Rollins mentioned a couple of times that he wanted “to know why people hate America”, bringing him to the meat of his performance—which amounted to a travelogue through South Africa, Northern Ireland, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Pakistan, where he arrived immediately before the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. But his conclusions were soft. A genuinely hilarious five-minute section about spotting Yusuf Islam (the former Cat Stevens) at an airport crystallized the problem. Rollins described Islam as “the man who was okay with the fatwa exacted against Salman Rushdie all those years ago”, thereby glibly repeating misinformation that demands a closer examination by anyone truly interested in finding out “why people hate America”.

But that might be expecting a bit too much from a man who makes a good living from the mainstream American entertainment machine, and we’d be foolish to mistake Rollins for Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, or even George Carlin. After urging us gentle Canadians to “come and help teach Americans to feed and clothe themselves”, Rollins concluded with his hope that “my wonderful country makes the right choice” in the coming election. If we’re to infer Rollins’s tacit approval of Barack Obama from that statement, it’s worth noting that the “right choice” appeared on the Today show 12 hours later to announce that he would take on Colin “Yellowcake” Powell as an adviser if he wins the election. Does Hank really think this is “The Change We Need”?

Georgia Straight, October 2008