Sadly, our friend Thomas M. Disch has passed away , and even more sadly, apparently by his own hand on the Fourth of July.
The man could do anything involving words. He wrote award-winning science fiction such as Camp Concentration and (my favorite) the bleak volume The Genocides . He wrote a perennial children’s book called The Brave Little Toaster . He even wrote award-winning comic verse in fantastically difficult forms, including “Ballade of the New God”:
I have decided I’m divine.
Caligula and Nero knew
A godliness akin to mine,
But they are strictly hitherto.
They’re dead, and what can dead gods do?
I’m here and now. I’m dynamite.
I’d worship me if I were you.
A new religion starts tonight!
No booze, no pot, no sex, no swine:
I have decreed them all taboo.
My words will be your only wine,
The thought of me your honeydew.
All other thoughts you will eschew.
You’ll call yourself a Thomasite
And hymn my praise with loud yahoo.
A new religion starts tonight.
But (you might think) that’s asinine!
I’m just as much a god as you.
You may have built yourself a shrine,
But I won’t bend my knee. Who
Asked you to be my god? I do,
Who am, as god, divinely right.
Now you must join my retinue:
A new religion starts tonight.
All that I have said is true.
I’m god and you’re my acolyte.
Surrender’s bliss, I envy you.
A new religion starts tonight.
Endlessly talented, Tom was always a difficult character, with strange edges and an awkward, unbalanced and finally unbearably sad life. His friend and mentor, the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, once turned him into the FBI as a communist spy. He wasn’t, of course, and the incident probably tells more about the madness of Philip K. Dick than it does about Tom Disch. Still, it’s typical of the odd events that seemed to punctuate Tom’s life.
So much wasted, so many wrong turns, so much lost. This death has taken all my breath for speech.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
