WAR PIGS begins and ends with a riot.
The first at a Black Sabbath concert in 1997—the latter in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. In between is the story of James Corporeal, an ambitious Boy Scout who faces the agonizing contradiction between rebellion and obedience while leading a troop of scouts at the National Jamboree. Here, he witnesses a crisis of leadership that will send a generation of young Americans unknowingly down the path to dictatorship.
Summer, 1997. James Corporeal arrives at the jamboree radio station wanting to volunteer as a deejay but quickly discovers there are already too many boys waiting for the job. After all the scouts are turned away, he incites them to riot, triggering a jamboree-wide search for him.
Over the course of seven days, Corporeal hides in plain sight as the reluctant yet obedient pupil to his dictatorial scoutmaster. From him, Corporeal learns that to avoid capture he will have to sow divisions amongst his own scouts. He will have to turn a blind eye to violence and racism. He will have to spread lies and ultimately break the law that binds the scouts closest together.
Still, Corporeal keeps alive his will to rebel and resists indoctrination. When he earns a coveted job at the radio station, he discovers he can do what other scouts can’t. He voices skepticism, questions authority, and outs the crimes committed by boys and adults alike. Corporeal is not censored because the truths he tells are disguised as campfire stories.
Soon everyone is listening to James Corporeal on the radio, and as his audience grows, so does the hunt the for the scout who caused the riot.
Hear four excerpts from War Pigs as read by Ernest Loesser
War Pigs is a novel. The Boy Problem is the zine.
They called the jamboree the Super Bowl of Scouting, but you wouldn’t know about it unless you were a Boy Scout. People who have never been a scout will tell you how we sold war bonds during the First and Second World Wars and that’s about as much as they know.
Before I left for the jamboree, I went to a Black Sabbath concert. The crowd there went berserk. There was a riot and Black Sabbath got banned for life from Giants Stadium. This may sound hard to believe, but the jamboree wasn’t all that different from the Black Sabbath concert.
I made this zine when I got home. I used old merit badge pamphlets and photographs I took. I worked at the jamboree radio station. They gave me a tape recorder and said to interview my fellow scouts. I made a mix tape too-Black Sabbath songs spliced with these jamboree interviews.
I’ll send you both if you write me a note.
— James Corporeal, Fox Patrol, Jamboree Troop 138.
Touched by Lightning, 2009
Emergency Press
A collection of obituaries and other prose poems that penetrate the disordered and dysfunctional lives of complete strangers in an unnamed community. Loesser’s portraits are at once so diverse and yet so familiar, they are disturbing to the very bone.
Road Film, 2013
Emergency Press
In these new prose poems, Loesser uses his reportorial instinct to reassemble the obscure and recurrent tales he gathered along America’s lost highways. Here are discarded and violent news reports, local rumors, local horrors, and the unverifiable stories passed from one traveler to the next.
About the author
Between 2009 and 2013, Emergency Press published my two collections of prose poetry— Touched by Lightning and Road Film. After studying journalism at New York University, I worked as an investigative financial journalist, covering mergers and acquisitions on the eve of the global financial crisis in 2008. In 2015, I was earning a PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory and left that program to return home to New Jersey and manage my family’s manufacturing business.