Goodbye, Mr. Destructo?

Mobutu Sese Soku was the CIA-backed President of Zaire from 1965 until 1997. Given his sponsors, his stomping grounds, and the length of his rule, you've probably already guessed that he was a sociopathic, murderous dictator, installed to keep the Commies at bay in central Africa.

A very different Mobutu Sese Soku was, until recently, a blogger of no mean repute, running the often great, occasionally transcendent, Et Tu, Mr. Destructo? before being raptured into the enviable air of Gawker, where he was billed as "America's Screaming Conscience."  He also boasted one of the funnier Twitter feeds that ever I did follow.

"I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP, CHIEF!" — Joe Biden eating fistfuls of bbq Fritos from a BIG GRAB bag tucked by his crotch, watching Paul Ryan on TV
— Mobutu Sese Seko (@Mobute) August 11, 2012

I started reading Mobutu some time during his pre-Gawker days, when having my own blog still seemed to me like a waste of time. His almost free-form rants, routed in equal parts anger and semi-ironic detachment, were a strong sign that the spirit of Bill Hicks remains intact some place. He possessed a strong rotation of topics ranging from politics to sports to literature, and was armed with a reference window that would make Dennis Miller blush, if he were capable of shame. In my more self-conscious moments, I imagine Mobutu's voice tearing into my weaker posts, Something Awful-style, and I know I have to do better.

So his last piece for Gawker, in which he reveals himself as the mostly anonymous "Jeb Lund" and writes at gut-wrenching length about the damage the Internet can do to a person who deserves bad and receives worse, hit me pretty hard. In part because having this mystery lifted feels even more disruptive than the time my Sunday School teacher causally mentioned that there is no Santa Claus (not gonna lie, I always pictured him being black; Mobute and Santa, I mean). And in part for the very intimate reminder of what a terrible place the Internet can be. Mobute was forged in the fires of the Internet's most pitiless subforums and paid the price for his shenanigans there. His readers were generally unaware of that price, merely enjoying the caramelized fruits of what remained. Until yesterday. That's a reminder we could all use more often.

But I'm not so pained over the loss of his work, because we won't. This isn't the end for Lund's writing, it appears. Just of Mobute's. And, with luck, the start of something new for Lund. At the very least, Internet willing, we'll always have his archives.

Cheers, Mobute.