Wednesday, December 20, 2006
(8:50 AM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
The "Adam Kotsko" Hoax
Many of you already know that Adam Kotsko is a fraud. But few seem to have discerned the precise type and degree of the hoax that has been perpetuated on you for nearly three and a half years. Simply put: the "Adam Kotsko" you think you know, the graduate student characterized by extreme emotional neediness, self-indulgence, and reliably middle-brow tastes, does not really exist. "Adam Kotsko" is not simply a pseudonym, but a fictional character made up out of whole cloth.First, let's look at the name itself. While "Kotsko's" frenetic blogging activity has effectively buried the evidence, in 2001 anyone searching for the name "Adam Kotsko" on the Internet would have found this image:
It is a picture of the only real Adam Kotsko to have lived. This true Kotsko, a Ukrainian student, was tragically killed in 1910 by Polish rioters at the University of Lviv. His death became a cause célèbre in the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and eventually there arose a theatre troupe named after him. It was apparently this theatre aspect that drew our "Kotsko" to use this name, sullying the real Kotsko's brave sacrifice and retroactively endorsing the brutality of the malevolent Poles.
Once the origin of the pseudonym is revealed, the rest of the façade collapses as a matter of course. The Chicago Theological Seminary? Clearly a pseudonym for the University of Chicago Divinity School, which would never admit someone of our "Kotsko's" limited talents. The Church of the Nazarene? Obviously a made-up sect, probably something out of a Pynchon novel. And his entire personal life can be pieced together from episodes in John Irving novels.
The question now is: Who would do such a thing? Who would perpetrate such a hoax on the blogging public? Who do we know who is brilliant enough, not only to create this tortured anti-hero, but to sustain the act over more than three years of daily posts?
There is only one possible answer, an answer that most of you have probably figured out by now: "Adam Kotsko" is a fictional character created by me. I initially developed the pseudonym as a way of giving reign to my deepest libidinal impulses through blogging, but soon the character began to take on a certain ontological consistency that was beyond my control. I was eventually forced to assert myself in the blogospheric realm, as it were, "in person" -- and ironically, my own creation soon became my arch-nemesis. Suddenly I had a lot of sympathy for this "God" person.
Long story short: while I would love to retire the "Kotsko" pseudonym altogether and begin blogging in earnest in my own name, that unfortunately will have to wait until I can afford a health insurance plan with psychiatric coverage.
