Sympathy for the Devil

Headline in an Australian paper, which cares about this issue for some reason: “White House Monkeypox Response Deputy Dubbed ‘Gay Satanist’ by Conservatives.” Now why would those meanies do that? Because he has a pentagram tattoo, and that symbol is — really — a trademark of the Church of Satan.

Well, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and offers dead crows to the Father of Lies at midnight like a duck, then one might infer something. What’s more, the Monkeypox Responder was profiled in 2014 by the New York Post as a co-owner of a dungeon-themed workout place. The article quotes patrons and staff, and, lest you think they’re all acolytes of evil, they are boring conformists trotting out rote pseudo-spiritual drivel.

“We don’t worship the devil, we’re not Satan followers,” says Sarah LaBier, another co-owner. “We’re just sort of taking that energy and making it more positive.”

That energy. What exactly is that energy? As the Church of Satan people will tell you, it’s all about individualism and free expression. Old Scratch got a bad rap for being naughty and unbound, so they’ll snatch his mantle to rile up the normies. The difference between these guys and the heavy-metal bands who made devil horns to excite the legions of virgins who bought their records is probably a degree in sociology.

“We play edgy videos but in a real positive class,” says the Monkeypox Responder’s husband, Michael Macneal. “There’s light even in darkness.”

Actually, there isn’t, which is why it’s called “darkness.” Oh, I get what you mean: In the grimmest of times, there is enlightenment, just as one might say “There’s nourishment even in starvation,” in the sense that you learn something about yourself as you wither away and this could be considered a form of psychic enrichment. But even that’s stupid.

Also, edgy videos. Ooooooh. How edgy?

“‘We played the uncensored “Erotica” by Madonna,’ recalls Macneal, a former model who has been teaching spin classes around the city.”

Whoa! You mean the dreary, grainy, relentlessly unerotic video that’s available on YouTube? Wow! This is like making everyone swear on a skin-bound copy of the Necronomicon when they sign up for recurring credit-card charges. I’m sure it’s a way of winnowing out the timid: This place might have upside-down crosses and pentagrams, but if they start showing Madonna videos I’m out of here. For what shall it profit a person if they firm all their abs, and lose their own soul?

The Monkeypox Responder is Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who has also been lauded as “Nasty Pig Hero” by a clothing store named, well, “Nasty Pig.” These were probably accomplishments that put him over the other candidates, but you can imagine someone in the administration raising a slight objection.

“Can we find someone who is not a hero for the Nasty Pig leather shop? Can we find a leather-daddy guy who maybe doesn’t co-own a Satanist gym? Where ‘sweatin’ to the oldies’ doesn’t mean working out while Gregorian chants are played backwards? Optics-wise, isn’t this a bit much?”

“Sure, we could get some superannuated milquetoast nerd, but who would listen to him?”

“Well, everyone listened to Fauci, so the archetype obviously carries some authority.”

“Are you saying there’s something wrong with the Nasty Pig Hero archetype?”

(Person carefully considers what to say next, as it may affect the rest of their employment trajectory.)

“No, of course not. Pentagram-inked leather-lovers are right up there with morbidly obese — I mean with fortunately proportioned — drag artists on the whole brave-and-stunning spectrum. But I worry we’re providing ammunition to the quasi-fascist MAGA types who will use this as evidence that the Biden administration endorses leather-clad Satanic fitness instructors.”

“So let them! They want to look like bigots and Sataniphobes, all the better. It’ll only hurt them. They’ll lose the unmarried purple-haired white female elementary-school teachers with nose bolts who live with six cats and make TikToks about how their first graders decided that the goldfish in the classroom aquarium have nonbinary pronouns, and if they’re willing to throw away that demographic, I say we let them.”

It’s not that the regular adults in the room are thinking Finally, hot Nasty Pig Hero representation. It’s that they don’t want to say no, because that would tag them as square. People who don’t get the whole Satan thing. I mean, there’s the Satan thing, and then there are the bad guys, right?

Okay. Bad guys like, say, the Klan? Somehow you doubt a Klan-themed workout facility would get a whimsical profile.

“We’re not white supremacists with a wretched history of lynching and violence, not at all. We can take that energy and turn it into something positive. All the stationary bikes are in a dark room for ‘night rides,’ but now it has a healthy meaning. There’s light even in the darkness, especially when you light a cross in front of someone’s home.”

The media would not approve. But if the gym were communist-themed, with old Soviet posters of people pointing to the glorious socialist future when workers all over the world will not only control the means of production but have tight glutes, that would be okay. You could open a Gulag Fitness — “time-tested, zek-endorsed weight-loss methods,” but not a Bergen-Belsen Gym where “workouts will make you free.”

“Nazis, nah, but Satan, sure.” These are the exquisite moral divides of our time.