An original story about the grassroots internment of terrible people.

The first hatching most of us remember is the one in Stone Mountain Park, where a dozen bulging burlap sacks appeared beneath the gaze of the Confederate heroes chiseled into the mountain’s north face. It was just past sunrise on a cool autumn morning, and a groundskeeper cut a diagonal path through the dewy meadow to be the first to get close to these inanimate objects; he thought they looked like giant turds, and gave several a poke and a kick before deciding to share the burden of dealing with them. By the time the police arrived, the spectators had gathered, phones out. Then the objects moved, the crowd gasped, and more officers arrived on the scene; still, it took another hour of emphatic tumbling for the bags to unload their contents, as the cops needed time for improvised protocols before cutting the burlap with box knifes and garden tools. Out came the most bloated, ruddy-faced caricatures of brownie-hating good ol’ boys the state of Georgia can produce — two per bag. They shed free of their cocoons, stood, rubbed their necks, and fell back down, their pants belted tight around their ankles. It was a moment made for Facebook Live, YouTube, BuzzFeed, and other transmitters of viruses. Six of the hatchlings were known sex offenders, two were identitarian bloggers, one raised fighting dogs, one flew a Rhodesian flag outside his trailer home, and the rest had varying brands of hostility toward blacks, gays, and their sympathizing libtards. What they all had in common was a love — expressed openly and frequently in social media — for Christ, Hitler, and Robert E. Lee’s definition of a gentleman.

The internet attributes the movement’s birth to the Stone Mountain event because it coincided with an anonymously penned screed that slipped into the news cycle the same day:

BAG OF DICKS: A REMEDY FOR OUR TIME Introducing a grassroots internment program for the correction of horrible people. If you subscribe to fairness, equality, and basic human decency, Bag of Dicks is yours to deploy. We live in an insufferable age in which Dicks are winning at all levels of society, penetrating our institutions and ejaculating all over our culture. They’ve fucked our better angels and deep-throated the public discourse with their bullying, baiting, lying, cheating, bigotry, zealotry, solipsism, narcissism, asswipery, douchebaggery, aggression, and oppression. Dicks are above, below, and all around us — from the White House to the frat house to the house next door. We’ve endured them for too long. No more. It’s time to deliver the most social of justice. To take a Dick into your own hands. Here’s how: 1. Get a bag. One that’s large, strong, and breathable. Burlap is best. 2. Sedate the Dick. Roofies aren’t just for date rape any more. 3. Bag the Dick. Slip the bag over the Dick and close it tight with heavy-duty zip ties. For homophobic Dicks, consider packing two in one bag. 4. Place the bag. Put it somewhere conspicuous. Even better if the location is connected to the Dick’s worst transgression. 5. Show and tell. Share the bag’s location with everyone — but keep your identity to yourself. Use a public computer. Don’t use your name. After all, the aim is the Dick’s internment, not your imprisonment. The real show happens when the Dick comes out of its haze, makes a fumbling effort to escape, and eventually reveals itself to the crowd assembled on site and online. At this point, it’s important that we all stare, laugh, and point at its shriveled state. Bag of Dicks is a simple tactic but a powerful symbol, exposing the worst among us. Perhaps the Dicks will learn the right lessons, reassess their personalities, and recalibrate their behaviors toward others. Regardless, we will have succeeded in marginalizing them in humiliating fashion. One Dick at a time, we can set the parameters for a better society. Don’t be a Dick. Bag a Dick. Because to act a Dick is to ask for it.

We can’t be certain the principal (or operative, or consortium, or loose federation) who typed this war whoop was directly responsible for Stone Mountain, because he or she (or it) didn’t adhere to all the instructions; there was no reference to the specific act. On the surface it seemed obvious that the writer and perpetrator were one and the same, but there were — and still are — too many open questions to know for sure. For example, we know when the document caught our attention, but we don’t know when it was composed. Did it circulate in closed circles before its wide release? Was Stone Mountain inspired by it? Or was it inspired by Stone Mountain? Was it written by one person, located somewhere in the Atlanta area, who enlisted like-minded friends to carry out the deed? Or was it a directive in a more expansive network? For that matter, which of the other baggings were feats of coordination, and which were mere imitation? It wasn’t like Anonymous, which gives itself a name and a face to suggest its far-flung combatants share a collective brain; yes, more than a few people and organizations took credit for the origin of Bag of Dicks, but their claims were all quickly debunked. This was a branded exercise without a branded entity above it.

Let’s go back, briefly, to the expression itself. “Eat a bag of dicks” started to make the rounds as an alternative to “go fuck yourself” in 2007, after Louis CK (a future bagee) performed a bit where he deconstructed, in excruciating detail, this peculiar new epithet he’d heard from a pissed-off guy in traffic. Around the same time, it made its first social-media appearance when @sneakybitch tweeted, “Dear today: eat a bag of dicks.” It really hit the zeitgeist, though, in 2015, when a website allowed you to send an actual bag of gummy penises — to eat, ostensibly — as a message to friends or enemies; immediately, thousands of people shipped the stuff to those inflamed militia men in that Oregon bird sanctuary, to ridicule their sausage fest of a protest.

The Bag of Dicks Manifesto — or Salvo, or Call to Arms, or whatever we want to call it — appropriated the phrase. But did it really invent this manifestation of it?

While the specifics of its provenance remain a mystery, there’s no arguing that the message was perfectly tuned to the political moment, and that the Georgia Dicks accelerated things by contributing immensely shareable visuals as they frothed at the mouth, swung at the air, and threatened to kill everyone watching. We know what happened from there. The phenomenon took off, bags popping up like pustules on college campuses, golf courses, playgrounds, beaches, ski slopes, highway shoulders, sidewalks, bridges, skyways, corporate plazas, convention floors, dance floors, award-show stages, yacht decks, public fountains, embassy doorsteps, Wall Street, Sunset Boulevard, Lincoln’s lap, Crazy Horse’s head, French Quarter balconies, Gold Coast stoops, the broad lawns of pro athletes’ houses, the narrow confines of construction catwalks, conference tables, truck beds, park benches, front porches, high-school cafeteria floors, and billions of screens. You could find yourself in a sack — soon to be famous in the #bagofdicks feed, across multitudes of platforms — if you picked on the weak, screwed the poor, mocked the handicapped, shamed the obese, groped the young, boned the unconscious, exploited the undocumented, taunted, flaunted, fired, filibustered, blustered, lynched, goaded, scapegoated, hogged the spoils, or generally paid no mind to the Golden Rule. In the early to middle stages, the execution of Bag of Dicks was remarkably consistent with the purpose expressed in the screed, targeting people who were extravagantly antisocial — particularly from the progressive point of view — and successfully shifting the tides of populism to the left. No matter how you felt about the larger harm or benefit of the punishment, or on which side of the culture wars you fought, you would likely agree these were not the standard-bearers of an amiable republic.

There was the radio host who called on his listeners to bring their guns to minority neighborhoods, to deliver some order to “these savage hellholes.” He hatched from his bag in the middle of East St. Louis, and was promptly beaten back into unconsciousness.

In Houston, there was the energy executive who fired employees with gusto, and without warning, for such infractions as talking to him in the men’s room, having an annoying laugh, or displaying a photo of a wife who wasn’t attractive enough. He crawled out of a sack, groggy and bewildered, on a billboard platform forty feet above the highway — below an ad about his company’s award-winning customer service.

JB Free, the singer/songwriter/rapist who showed off his victim’s bloody panties on Instagram, was bagged with the judge who gifted him the lightest of sentences. They emerged to great fanfare, covered in red body paint, among the tents at Bonnaroo.

The assertive liberals of San Francisco had their fun, giving the cinch to tech bros who accosted the homeless, ICE agents who raided its Mexican neighborhoods, tourists who littered, and others who didn’t abide by the rules of their sanctuary. When that billionaire VC drove his McLaren around the Tenderloin, throwing out bags of meth to watch the addicts fight like crows, he should have known where he would end up.

It wasn’t enough that the NFL fined and suspended Warren Selbo, the mercurial All-Pro tight end, for celebrating a touchdown reception with a marionette-like pantomime of his defender’s handicapped daughter. Later that week, he and his three-man entourage were found in a trash heap outside a Manhattan nightclub, contained by the materials at hand: velvet curtains and brocade rope. This was just one in a long sequence of abductions in the world of sports — fertile territory for Dicks to grow. Someone, somehow, got to the enforcer types on NBA teams who injured other players; the baseball players who swatted at hookers; the boxers who jabbed their kids; the agents who demanded exorbitant salaries for their mediocre clients; owners who extorted their cities’ taxpayers for more money, or who moved their teams away from the fans who had invested in their product; WAGs who maligned opponents’ WAGs on Twitter; coaches who ran up the score; and sometimes, the athlete who simply outplayed the home team.

In every sphere of the American experience, it seemed, the Dicks kept coming. Like the 29-year-old hedge fund manager with the huge ivory collection. The stand-up comic with all the synonyms for vagina. The cast of Fox & Friends. Those high-school kids who created that gallery of grief-stricken girls, uglycry.com. Paris Hilton and Perez Hilton, bagged together. Other witty combinations: Bag of Russells (Crowe, Brand, and the one who dressed as an unborn fetus in Jackson Hole’s Memorial Day parade), the Real Housewives Reunion Internment, and the mercenaries of Posse Comitatus with the band Pussy Communists. The Ohio mom who locked her third-grader son in the dog cage for hiding her Vicodin. The guy who Photoshopped nudes of historical figures — including an obscenely endowed Malcolm X and skeletal Anne Frank. The American Ninja Warrior competitor who faked a story of childhood abuse to get on the show. Two former members of the Trump Cabinet: Jeff Sessions, on the planks of the Hanging Bridge in Shubuta, Mississippi, and in Grand Rapids, Betsy DeVos, bound entirely with products purchased from Amway. On a similar theme, semi-celebrities who’d once supported the real-estate magnate’s tyranny: Stephen Baldwin and Scott Baio, the latter’s bag stenciled with the words “WHO’S IN CHARGE?” The growing army of Dick catchers set their sights on, and opened their sacks for, celebrities and ordinary folk, one-hit shock jocks and everyday pariahs, whose indiscretions were both ripped from the headlines and pulled from the archives.

Roofies, as prescribed, were the sedative of choice, slipped into water bottles, coffee cups, soda cans, wine glasses, rocks glasses, pitchers, and whole jugs of Gatorade; in Silicon Valley, the meal-in-a-liquid Soylent was a popular delivery mechanism for dissolved pills, while in certain financial districts you might be served a very dirty martini. But there were other forms and methods. If the Dick was an enthusiastic drinker, you might just go for large quantities of alcohol; the drawback, of course, was that it required a lot of social time with a person you despised, and opened you up to suspicion when the Dick recalled the prior evening in pieces. Drinks spiked with grain alcohol or methanol were faster alternatives, popular in Appalachia and Mexico’s border states, respectively. The horse tranquilizer Special K made the rounds on the Jersey shore, and in Miami, Las Vegas, and the Boston suburbs. Nationwide, heavy doses of Ambien were almost as common as roofies. Benadryl also made a strong showing, as did Xanax. There were even some instances of general anesthesia, administered to the Dicks while they slept. And if you took your cues from the movies, you might try covering the Dick’s nose and mouth with a rag soaked in chloroform, only to discover its effects aren’t as quick as the filmmaker would have you believe; a number of would-be captors discovered the drug’s latency at the worst time, lost the struggle that ensued, and ended up in bags themselves.

Tips and tricks proliferated — trending on Pinterest, climbing the Reddit ranks, distributed through listservs, and widely discussed in online communities with a leftist bent. A culture of amateur pharmacology, logistics, and criminal law arose, with some input from professionals, and we saw a giant information exchange consisting of dosage tables for effective but non-lethal sedation, based on the size of the Dicks; side-by-side comparisons of amnestic effects, availability, and ease of administration; step-by-step illustrations of submission, capture, and placement, including how to contend with the more famous targets’ retinues and bodyguards (in short: take them all); and legal FAQs to help you understand what lines not to cross, and how to mitigate the consequences should you get caught. More and more people learned how to conduct illegal transactions on the dark web. Back on the regular web, Etsy and Amazon sold hundreds of variations on the “Bag of Dicks Kit,” which typically included some combination of zip ties, duct tape, handcuffs, blindfolds, bandannas (to cover your face or theirs), Tasers, cattle prods, pepper spray, droppers, pipettes, and a large sack made of burlap, canvas, Tyvek, nylon netting, or polypropylene punched with breathing holes. A considerable number of bags were sourced from Uline, a family-owned industrial supplier, until word got out that the CEO donated vast sums to the Proven Conservatives SuperPAC; the surge in his business ended abruptly with him inside a competitor’s bulk storage container.

In accordance with item number five, “Show and tell,” the wiser and more fastidious of these wardens of common virtue hit the computers at schools, public libraries, Best Buys, and Apple stores, as well as wireless carriers’ demo phones. Tip-offs ranged from vague to specific, loquacious to succinct, bombastic to deadpan. Most kept their bag’s occupant a mystery in the service of a big reveal, but occasionally the tipsters couldn’t contain their excitement. That, or they knew the name of their catch would drive more traffic to the location.

Rotunda at Mall of America. Look up. #bagofdicks This Lothario asshole knowingly spread his HIV to as many women as he could get into bed. We dumped him on a muddy bank in famously contaminated Love Canal, New York. It’s the least we could do. #inthesack #spreadtheword #bagofdicks ¡Bolsa de polla en la estación de El Paso! Él obtuvo lo que merecía. Got a couple rapey ones. #unionterrace #bagofdicks In Gallant, Alabama, there’s an old children’s cemetery where it’s said the spirits come out to play at night. It’s across the road from Gallant Baptist, the church of one Roy Stewart Moore, who returned to old habits once he was out of the national spotlight. We couldn’t imagine a better place to put him. Bring your spotlights, people. https://goo.gl/maps/bc3AwjhMWN62 EVERYONE GO SEE MADISON AND STU FROM #THEBACHELORETTE IN FRONT OF ST MICHAELS IN #CHARLESTON BEFORE THEY GET MARRIED THERE THEY ARE MADE FOR EACH OTHER THEY ARE BOTH MAJOR DICKS THE WORST PEOPLE EVER LMFAO #WEDDINGPRESENT #BAGOFDICKS

More baggings. More hatchings. The crowd went wild, again and again. Each appearance elevated the hysteria, inspiring the next, and the next, and the next. It was a messy sort of feedback loop — crowdsourced, frenzied, and full of errors. Best practices were refined and repeated to some extent, yet for all the information and examples available, we kept seeing the same mistakes: undersedation, requiring blunt force to complete the task; oversedation, which gave the authorities time to remove the bags before they stirred, or worse, martyred (somewhat) the Dicks who ended up in comas; bodies moved distances that crossed the threshold into more serious kidnapping charges (an accepted risk in some cases, but more commonly a matter of ignorance of the law); people posting the accomplishment from their personal computers and Instagram accounts, effectively asking the police to come find them; and an alarming number of dim-witted perps who thought the ephemeral nature of Snapchat would erase their connection to the crime. In terms of response, though, the quality of execution didn’t really matter. Flawless, militaristic precision got the admiration it deserved, to be sure, but in its absence, we could still count on the spectacular conflict between the public’s mirth and outrage with every fresh proof of concept. Mirth had the numbers, with hundreds then thousands then millions of reactions drowning out the bellicose voices of the outraged minority, whose objections came down on one of two sides: (a) this is not the way to handle it, or (b) who are you to decide who’s a Dick? The merry masses pointed, shouted, cackled, swelled, burst, and wept with a righteous sense of triumph, crowding the bags with their lungs and their lenses, breaking the internet with multiple angles on the crimes: panoramas of the crowds assembled around the bags; time-lapse videos of the mounting panic in the sentient heaps’ graceless activity; extreme close-ups of the Dicks’ aggrieved faces squeezing through hard-earned slits and holes; Boomerangs of the standing and falling and standing and falling; cleverish memes; and infectious GIFs.

THESE JAMOKES!!! THEY PISSED AF!!! THE REST OF US, WE HAPPY AF!!! Check out these #gay bashers duct-taped together in a #69 position. Lovely touch. #justiceserved #bagofdicks #laguna #sunshine Whoever did this…will you marry me? Angry white dude crawls out and shouts the N-word at the crowd. Shit got ugly. Shit got beautiful. #dickpop #nutbust #beatdown #bagofdicks #boomerang #racism This. #NCAA #bagged Must have taken the whole cartel to bring down these steroid freaks. #WWE #bagofdicks Cuckservative fratstars in the hizzouse! https://www.flickr.com/groups/61743857@N00 THIS DICK TRAVEL SIZE There. Is. A. God. If this doesn’t inspire you, nothing will. Grab a bag, ladies. Change the culture. Take the country. #BagofDicks #Merica #TimesUp HOLY SHIT, THEY GOT SHKRELI! LOOK AT HIS FACE! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! http://dickface.tumblr.com/post/60336088247/shkrell-yeah

Oh, the faces. Not just unbecoming. Disfigured, almost. Eyes swollen shut, like Rocky after the fight; or sometimes, bulging from their sockets, frozen in horror. Deep red imprints of burlap weave on their cheeks and foreheads. Scratches. Abrasions. Pores wide open. The skin a petri dish of dried fluids — sweat, mucus, spots of blood, shimmering pus. And it’s interesting how a physiognomy can change so drastically; how a face, so central to identity, can lose its shape, oneness, and connection to the self when the muscles behind it go completely slack. It took a moment to recognize some of these people. Hammy blowhards were missing their personas. The illusion of confidence was gone. Celebrities looked their age, and then some. As the crowd pressed in, laughing, prodding, pointing their flashes and flashlights, narrating their videos, the Dicks’ faces were locked in a cadaverous state. This is what it looked like to be the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time in our evolution.

Even if you were of sound mind and body, it would have taken exceptional effort to escape one of these prisons. Under the circumstances it was nearly futile; the material didn’t make allowances for your weakened tissues and slowed comprehension. If you were lucky enough to have keys on you, or to be wearing sharp jewelry, you could go at the fabric in small, interminable mouse scratches — there wasn’t much room for a jabbing or slashing motion — until there was just enough of an aperture to push your way out, one body part at a time. This required deep reserves of patience and perseverance, which, as a Dick, you probably never had in the first place, so instead, you kicked, screamed, punched, jerked, and contorted. You freaked the fuck out. Once you were too exhausted to continue, and the mob outside had sufficiently enjoyed the performance, your best bet was for someone to step in and cut or untie the bag from the outside — not to be a good samaritan, but because the audience couldn’t handle the suspense any longer. Then you crawled or rolled out. You tried to stand, pushing up from your knees. Or you stayed on the ground, kneeling, or on all fours, looking frantically around, or shielding your face. Your clothes — if you had clothes — were rumpled, shirt twisted around your torso, skirt hiked up, pants ripped, socks falling off, and the rest of us got to know your body better: belly exposed, ass crack showing, patches and pockets of hair, moles, scars, eczema, and cellulite making their public debut. And not one detail went unnoticed. Humiliating, indeed. Suffice it to say, it was a hard thing to recover from.

Released from captivity, their dignity escaping them — stars rising in ways they never aspired to — many of the Dicks lost their jobs, their livelihoods, their families, their friends, and/or the freedom to run the simplest of errands without a disguise. There were a few cases where networks of support came forward, defended the Dicks, and helped them get back on their feet; but there were more cases of divorce, abandonment, alcoholism, and suicide.

As app designers do, let’s map the experience from an individual’s perspective. Walk the steps of the journey. We’ll use as our persona (user type: Dick) the aforementioned pitcher of methamphetamines.

Paul Panagopolous — “Polo” for short — is a Bay Area financier in his mid-forties. Raised in the Detroit suburbs. Educated at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. He’s the founder of Capitol Capital in Menlo Park, and has a net worth in the neighborhood of $1.8 billion. He’s on his second marriage, and is the father of three young children; they split their time between four homes on two continents. On the surface, our guy Polo is physically fit but otherwise an anodyne geek. He’s a vocal advocate of more women in STEM careers; he mentors high-school girls, both tawny brunettes and crystalline blondes, and nearly half the companies his firm finances are run by objectively good-looking women. One of his hobbies: social experiments. He asks himself, “What if?” Forms a hypothesis. Then conducts a test, tweaking the variables as he makes his observations. For example: adjusting compensation models based on the Indian caste system; determining the price at which entrepreneurs will abandon their values, graphed by race, body weight, and other personal data points; and arriving at the conclusion that Eastern European women are most accepting of his touch.

At least two nights a week, Polo drives his McLaren, Bentley, or vintage Aston Martin (he’s an Anglophile) up to San Francisco to catch a game or a show, and sometimes a piece of ass off the street. One evening, through one of his prostitutes, he finds a drug dealer and buys enough meth to erase the teeth of a small town. He then weaves through the streets in the wee hours of the morning until he spots the walking dead, and tosses the product on the sidewalk to see how they respond. Invariably, they take a moment to register it, tilt their heads, then attack his gifts, shoving and clawing each other. This is very funny to him, so he laughs. Loudly. Throws out a few more. Laughs again. Peels out. Looks for the next spot. Does this several times. Couple nights later, Polo is at a new sushi restaurant in Mountain View, dining with two young ladies who have an idea for a networking site that’s part LinkedIn, part TMZ. His vision blurs, mouth goes dry, and he slurs his speech. Thinks it must be the unagi. Blacks out. Wakes up to a cacophony of voices and idling engines. Is poked and prodded, but all he sees are faint halos through a gauzy brown filter. Coarse material chafes his face and arms. He’s wrapped up in something, mummified almost. It’s hard to breathe. So he goes fantastically spastic. Screams obscenities. Hears laughter. Screams more obscenities. Eventually sees a shard of bright light as a CHP officer slices open his encasement. Discovers he’s on the median of a busy road, choking traffic. People are cackling, woohooing, and taking his picture. He says fierce things, contorting his face in anger, which pleases the rubberneckers even more. Cut to the hospital, where he sees his puffy face on the local news. Learns he was on Mashable the night before, identified as the billionaire who did that terrible thing — caught on video from someone’s apartment. Flips the channel and sees he’s on national TV, too. Women he recognizes are pinning tales of harassment on him. Principals of start-ups, many defunct, say he abused his hold on their companies’ lifelines. They’re calling him a dick. No, a Dick. And there’s copious footage of his wild performance on Sand Hill Road. He starts to understand what happened to him, and why. His phone is blowing up, but he doesn’t answer it. He crafts his side of the story — a highly rational mea culpa. Then, the public flames his statement; the haters come at him from all sides, from all over the world; the lawsuits pile up; the firm is turned inside out and upside down; his wife takes the kids to her hometown in Slovenia; he can’t leave the house without seeing the glares, or hearing the names, or feeling the hot coffee in his lap or on his head; can’t make any more deals; can’t conduct any sort of business, anywhere; can’t find any reason to keep on living; and his journey ends in the meditation room of his hilltop home, where he drains a bottle of Lagavulin laced with ricin.

As someone once said: to act a Dick is to ask for it.

Single tenants comprised the vast majority of the internments, even though there was a discernible increase in hulabaloo for multiples — a reward for the extra effort. The bags tumbled across borders and leaped over ponds, appearing in places as diverse and divergent as Juarez, the Bahamas, Crimea, Mount Kilimanjaro, and London; the British rapper Khal the Dog performed an homage to a Kendrick Lamar lyric, “This Dick Ain’t Free” — revising its meaning — which shot to the top of the UK Top 40 and inspired some of his countrymen to bring life to his language. But while it wasn’t quite all-American, Bag of Dicks was a predominantly stateside force majeure. The sample size grew to statistical significance. Clusters appeared. Patterns of animus perpetuated, fanned out, and claimed more subjects.

While shouting their invectives at Denver’s PrideFest Parade, the picketers of Westboro Baptist Church were stuffed into bags, conscious and flailing, by musclebound transvestites who then coopted the offending signs — “Fags Doom Nations,” “Shame Not Pride,” “Homos in Hell” — in an impromptu cabaret show for the delighted onlookers’ iPhone cameras. Here, then, we have one of the most heavily targeted subsets: religious zealots. A large cast of villains from a wide range of denominations woke up in environments that mocked their core beliefs, or that represented the moral depravity they warned of in their most impassioned fire-and-brimstones. Dozens of Scientologists, dizzy from their anti-gravity perceptics enhancement, were intercepted upon leaving their Clearwater headquarters, bagged, transported, and arranged on the floor of a sci-fi convention in Orlando. The leader of the Commandants, an aggressively literal Christian sect near Sacramento, was a surprise guest at Burning Man. Mormons showed up in singles bars and sex clubs. Several pastors of megachurches hatched in front of the gates to their mega mansions. It was a bad time to try your voice as a subway proselytizer, to attend a tent revival, or to be praised by Pat Robertson. Muslims, meanwhile, were both defended and prosecuted, which showed the contradictions of the progressive activists who first embraced this style of retribution; you could get bagged for shouting a slur at a woman wearing a hijab, or for being a devout man who required she do so.

Just as white supremacists were coming out of the shadows, they were shrouded again, bagged by the thousands. Not just their thought leaders, but the flop-sweat hordes who screamed their refrains. Their assemblies were surrounded, photos were taken, names ascertained, and punishment applied systematically, in good time. To draw them out, statues of slave owners were toppled throughout the Southeast, and their more voluble functionaries, once quieted, were placed on the empty pedestals. In an Idaho potato field, nearly one hundred men and women (mostly men) were wrapped in Nazi flags and arranged in a perfect rectangle — an allusion to the Third Reich’s mass ornament. Later, in Charlottesville, residents, students, and an uncharacteristically disciplined regiment of Antifa soldiers infiltrated the Aryan interlopers’ ranks and slipped sedatives into their provisions; on the anniversary of the events of 2017, the picturesque Lawn at the University of Virginia was a minefield of sacks with words like “HUSH BABY,” “EXTINCT,” and “HATE FUCK” spray-painted on them, while down the road at the Monticello plantation, alt-right figurehead (and UVA alum) Richard Spencer was planted in Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable garden.

The biggest segment: randy men on the upper rungs. If #MeToo was the exigency, and #TimesUp the declaration, then Bag of Dicks was the means — the most provocative method, and a logical next step in women’s determination to put the nail in (or, the sack over) the normalized subjugation that had persisted throughout the history of our species. Now, for real, it was time to prove they wouldn’t take this shit. What started as the mere outing of Hollywood’s most pathological fondlers became a warlock hunt across industries, communities, and demographic slices, and the more hardline among the waves of vigorously empowered women grabbed hold of these bags as their weapon and their symbol — waving them as a warning, brandishing them at marches, and applying them as they were intended. Like the pussy hats, the color of choice was pink, and you could purchase yours online (all proceeds going to, say, Planned Parenthood) or look up a wide variety of sewing patterns and knitting instructions, including several bag designs in the shape of a uterus. If you emerged from a pink bag, there was no mistaking what you were accused of. The usual suspects — well-known grabbers and penetrators from media, politics, and finance — were caught in the snare, including some throwbacks: early plaintiffs in the #MeToo court of social delirium, like Steve Wynn and Mario Battali. In a goof on the old segment “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” the disgraced former morning-show personality was repeatedly seized and dropped in different locations — the Hamptons, Aspen, the Santa Monica Promenade, just outside the “Today” studio’s picture window, and a ranch in Wellington, New Zealand. But when it came to this particular application, the bags’ more awesome power was as a signal flag in the less-visible recesses of our culture and economy, where names and faces weren’t enough to dominate the news cycle. Women in accounting firms, hospitals, mall stores, warehouses, dealerships, hotels, gyms, police precincts, village halls, and research centers had an effective new way to settle their scores with the concupiscent men who weren’t adapting to the new order. In high schools and colleges, too. Entire school districts closed their doors as they tried to figure out how to contend with the bag invasion; too many horny young men, and the occasional teacher, were learning the hard way the expediency of consent. At the University of Arizona, the sisters of Theta knocked out the brothers of SAE — a.k.a., Sexual Assault Expected — with the fraternity’s own signature roofie cocktail; and with the help of their boyfriends and other sympathizers, the ladies stripped the frat guys and photographed them in homoerotic positions before delivering them in pink bags to the porch of Old Main. This touch, this flare, was met with as much opprobrium as celebration, and may be where things started to turn.

Homophobic pundits, anchors, columnists, producers, and novelists also got the Mapplethorpe treatment — shucked and snapped in subversive poses — before getting sacked. Whether you shared the confines or not, there was a good chance you’d be denuded and Sharpied if you were a lawmaker who decried equal marriage and transgender bathroom rights, or the schoolyard tough who picked on the gay kid. For a while, these X-rated images owned Reddit, Tumblr, and Google image searches, and kept Instagram’s moderators’ hands full. They made conservatives profoundly uncomfortable, naturally, but many on the left also condemned these acts for caricaturizing homosexuality. Across the ideological spectrum, the dramatic irony was losing its appeal.

Which brings us to the next chapter: Getting It Wrong. The tactic lost its movement. Its direction. Its purpose. The definition of a Dick became too broad, and of the crimes, too narrow. More and more, the justification was specious; the adjudication, out of proportion. Cheat on a test, get the bag. Drive an expensive car, get the bag. Challenge a premise for the sake of debate, get the bag. Yell at the ref, play finicky with the waiter, take the last purse at the sample sale, jump the line, flip the bird, shoot the look, eat the rare meat, rate the driver two stars, mislead the customer, charge the high price, backtrack the promise, forward the dirty joke, chop down the tree, let the dog bark too long, leave the water on too long, lower the standards, raise your voice at the meeting, like the Soundcloud rapper, like the other team, like the Republican’s comment on Facebook, love foie gras, hate Meryl Streep, overwork the employee, pass up the employee for the big promotion, give the insincere apology: bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag, bag. They came for the professor who graded on a curve. They came for the neighbor who wasn’t very friendly. They came for the middle manager who sang the party line. Bag of Dicks, the high-minded initiative, was adopted for petty disagreements, territorial disputes, thin-skin umbrage, and hair-trigger indignation. A heavy sanction for light offenses. Small stuff. Stupid shit.

How young can a Dick be? At what age do you draw the line? College kids can certainly be held accountable for the people they’re turning out to be, no? High school, well, that’s a bit on the tenderfoot side, but it was argued by some — by many — that 15 to 18 is the perfect bracket of development in which to intervene; tilt the snot-nosed rapscallion’s trajectory away from a lifetime as an unequivocal Dick and toward a relatively inoffensive existence. What we learned about ourselves: if the teenager commits a serious enough violation of the social contract, such as rape, the Bag of Dicks solution doesn’t disturb our consciences too, too much. Middle school, though — that’s a little fucked up, as these kids don’t even know who the hell they are yet; the prefrontal cortex isn’t yet prepared for the turbulence of this age — the cacophony of emotional, physical, and social upheavals — so who on this good earth would throw these youngsters farther out of whack by throwing them in a bag? Besides, some of them still have high voices and baby faces. Grade-school kids? No way. Come on. Out of the question, obviously. Don’t even go there. But wait, check that, apparently we don’t all accept that as a no-fly zone. It’s not the universal norm we thought it was.

Middle-schoolers crept into the fray, which at first seemed rather heinous to most of us, but as the whole Bag of Dicks phenomenon scaled across all age groups, the frequency dulled the edges of our displeasure — especially if it were, say, a 13-year-old with a grown man’s body and determination to prove himself. With fists. Or with a knife. Or with nude photos of an 11-year-old classmate. The smaller kids presented a bigger problem. There were two at first, neither execution even remotely skillful or photogenic; nonetheless, they planted a seed: this could be a thing. One was the fifth-grade ruffian who showed up in a dusty lot in Barstow, collected, we learned from the CNN ticker, by his mom’s boyfriend. The other was a fourth-grade mean girl in Philadelphia’s Main Line, gagged and bagged by an ex-BFF’s older brother. We immediately hated where this was going. Almost all of us did. Maybe the outcry — ardent expressions ranging from “Bag of Dicks has always been bad,” to “Bag of Dicks has finally gone too far,” to “Bag of Dicks is still great but not for this” — helped buttress the floodgates for a while. A month went by, and no more young children. Whew! Right? It didn’t last. Concurrently, plenty of fully adult jerks — more palatable victims — showed up in bags to sustain a general air of enthusiasm among the sanctimonious left, who then lost their wind when the kids came again, and in force. It was sensational, if not statistically significant. Playground bullies didn’t exactly become one of the wider wedges on the pie chart, but they were trending. And it was mostly adults doing the bagging; if kids can be cruel, parents can be crueler. Fifth, fourth, third, second…the grades were lowered. Boys and girls who hadn’t yet learned how to behave in a civil society, who picked on other boys and girls, arrived in clumps next to swing sets and slides, or were circled in chalk next to hopscotch squares, or landed in soccer goals, bus shelters, or their own front yards. Little League parents didn’t just go after the coaches and umpires any more; they widened their scope to include the tykes who threw wild pitches, or who got more playing time than Dad’s more deserving offspring. In Chicago and Baltimore, gangs used the tactic as recruitment by intimidation; in certain neighborhoods, best of luck to you if you couldn’t pick up your kids right after school. One teacher attached a resignation letter to the bag of her most difficult student.

Inevitably, an 8-year in a deep sleep looks more angel than devil. When that, lying akimbo, dreaming a bad dream, was what we saw inside a sliced-open sack, it produced a categorical change in our collective response. We didn’t rush to the scene to pause, to pull out our phones, to wait for the comedy show to begin, to enjoy the build to the big surprise. No, we jumped in to help open the bag right away, because who knows, it could be a kid in there. And if it wasn’t, revealing instead an adult who may have had it coming, we didn’t squeal with delight like we used to; maybe a sharp little laugh as we sighed our relief, but by now the levity was thoroughly subdued. Drained from us. Gone.

In Ithaca, New York: the first kindergartener. The doe-eyed boy had gone missing after school, and within hours, hundreds turned out to sweep every nook and cranny of the surrounding area. Later that night, the mother of one his classmates was caught in the flashlights as she dragged him in a duffle bag to the school’s front door. It took him a day to wake fully from his assisted sleep; he’d gotten an adult dose. His despondent parents met the press, and his dad read a handwritten statement while his wife stared into the distance:

Henry is five years old. He likes playing with Legos, drawing pictures of animals, and playing with our beagle, Rudy. His favorite character is Patrick the starfish and his favorite food is lasagna. He’s learning how to code because he wants to make video games. He also wants to be an astronaut one day, even though he thinks it might be scary. And he gives really awesome hugs. He does have impulse control issues, and we’ve been working with his therapist and the school’s social worker to help him get a handle on that. He’s made a lot of progress this year, paying attention in class and getting along better with the other kids. Yes, we do still have incidents. He bit another child, and we and the school disciplined him in a way that teaches him the consequences of his actions. It didn’t involve putting him in bag. Henry isn’t perfect, and he needs a lot of help, but he’s still an amazing human being. Again, he’s five. We don’t understand how someone could do something like this. Especially someone who knows that no matter how hard parenting can be sometimes, you love your child more than anything. You don’t do this to a five-year-old. You don’t do this to anyone. It’s not justice. It’s brutality. Bag of Dicks has to stop.

It didn’t. Tapered a bit, for a little while, but it didn’t stop.

We continued to see kids in the single digits, and up, and over, and off the rails. We saw adults who fit the original definition of a Dick — whose abductions therefore adhered to the original aims — and plenty who didn’t. We saw people caught in the prime of their lives, the extremes of their convictions, and the depths of their despair, suffering from delusions of grandeur, pathological narcissism, benign self-indulgence, general and persistent rectitude, the insufferable burden of absolutism, xenophobia, agoraphobia, constant engorgement and other vices, voices, dull verses, sharp pains in the brain, twisting pains in the gut, nagging itches up their asses, resting bitch faces, crippling insecurities, deafening uncertainty, severe disabilities, mental incapacities, the indiscretions of youth, the indignities of old age, excess whiteness, conspicuous non-whiteness, misinterpreted intentions, misplaced affinities, long-forgotten virtues, severe depression, and the misfortune of simply running into the wrong gringos. Swept up. Sewn up. Strewn.

We saw them in the bags, and we saw them do the bagging. Keep refreshing your browser and you’d see another interpretation. Another approach. Another consequence.

The father of a former gymnast pored over the registries of sex offenders and went after them systematically, cauterizing their genitals as part of his process. Then an offender who was offended — who didn’t care for this development — returned to action, cauterizing and bagging his new victims as a message to copycat vigilantes.

The Bag of Dicks emoji started as a joke, then the giggling stopped when it turned into a nonverbal threat, and not necessarily an idle one. Teenage girls went after each other in their competitions for boys’ affections, and the boys, for their part, didn’t pretend to mind; they boasted about their numbers — the more bags, the more hearts they were breaking.

In galleries, black box theaters, Milan, and Times Square, burlap sacks were plied and applied artistically and ironically. By the sculptor who dipped bags in fabric hardener and shaped them, with great precision, into the very specific forms of various porn stars’ penises. By the performance artist who wriggled out, covered in her own shit. By the fashion house that unveiled burlap dresses for the professional woman. By the illusionist Dick Magnificent, who had himself sealed up with a boa constrictor named Richard; Magnificent’s obituary may not have been the relevancy he wanted.

From the hills of Tennessee, there were reports that the cult Twelve Tribes, whose crops were their sustenance so far off the grid, put children who didn’t work the fields hard enough in sacks filled with nails. Among the vagrant, roving bands of The Brethren, this variant was an act of self-flagellation. As for the religious mainstream, it wasn’t uncommon for parishioners to form prayer circles around the wayward souls, now retrieved and contained, who once worshiped with them. Meanwhile, over in the Paris suburbs, Islamic extremists collected women who showed too much flesh and delivered them in weighted bags to the bottom of the Seine. “Ooh, that’s a good one,” the encephalopathic elders of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints must have said, as they too performed this ritual near their warren in Bountiful, British Columbia; if a woman revealed so much as a knee, she could very well sink in Kootenay Lake.

In factories, mines, and other blue-collar workplaces, the bag was a tangible expression of reverse-reverse discrimination. In Louisiana, the Klan rose up and fought back, using the bags as a prelude to lynching. Throughout the country, rural whites — the ones whose electoral influence produced, according to the screed’s original adherents, the climate of Dicks in the first place — got their blood up again, and in a mob-rule sort of gerrymandering, wielded bags on election days to gather up voters of Spook, Spic, and Ay-rab descent. Jews too, if they knew how to spot them. They even got their hands on a couple Presidential candidates. And globally, online, a contingent calling themselves The Deplorables scoured social media, marking black activists, brown academics, white diversity enthusiasts, and other prospective targets with the #bagofdicks hashtag.

The accusers of #MeToo, acolytes of #TimesUp, and other vociferous leaders of the modern women’s movement — from Rose McGowan to Elizabeth Warren — were directly confronted with the backlash that many had feared from the beginning, back when Harvey Weinstein was making his way across the coals. Reinvigorated men who’d been publicly shamed, or who’d had their pay docked to level things out, or whose stomachs couldn’t handle the speed of the revolt, or who never accepted the concept of full equality in the first place (per Steve Bannon), or who recoiled at the style and language of “all these uppity bitch lesbos talking shit out their cunts” (said Kid Rock), or who just wanted to put their glistening pricks wherever they damn well pleased (read: Dov Charney) — they returned with a vengeance. The ladies used pink, so the fellows responded with their own color coding. Their retribution left blue bags all over studio lots, university quads, and monuments to our nation’s patriarchal history in a practice that was commonly referred to as “blueballing.” Many of these swollen, bloviating prize fighters of male privilege advertised their accomplishments in selfies and videos — posing with women at sleep, or in the sack — deciding the gravity of the statement was well worth the short time served for a misdemeanor.

Bag of Dicks may have started as a non-lethal defense of the kinder aspects of our national character, but it was a statutory offense nonetheless. An awful lot of people got caught in spite of their best efforts to cover their tracks, and their trials trickled onto our TVs and into our news apps. There were convictions — a little community service here, a brief prison stay there — and in civil cases, damages awarded in small, medium, and large amounts. None of this was enough to dissuade and divert the riled-up masses; besides, most people were getting away with it entirely. Over time, though, as the winds shifted and flames spread, a certain calculus came into play: the thought that anonymity might not be all it’s cracked up to be; the legal punishment, not terribly harsh — or a discomfort that could be endured; or, fuck it, I’m happy to go down if I can take my enemies down with me. Looking back, we should have seen that the boundaries were doomed to be overstepped; this remedy for crimes against a better society, now a crime that cured us of all hope for a better society.

Lots of deaths. Accidental, and not so much. Captives deprived of their meds, of their coats, of their oxygen. Grand mal seizures, dramatic asphyxiations, and profound losses of blood. Bags left in meat lockers, or outside in subzero temperatures. Baked in car trunks, or roasted under the desert sun. Dropped from bridges and tall buildings. Shot on the firing range, and fired from cannons. Thrown in front of cars and tied in front of trains, the villains twisting their mustaches. We’ve seen the gruesome video of the Columbus Zoo tiger ripping apart the administrator accused of bestiality — a predator for a predator.

And we saw this, a terse decree from somewhere up high, roughly a year after the original — presumably from the same first author(s):

BAG OF DICKS: AN ADDENDUM Murder is not the point. Physical injury isn’t our bag. And tell us, what the hell is mutilation supposed to accomplish? If you don’t get it, you’re a Dick. You have no decency. No finesse. No role. We will reclaim our mission and our method of achieving it, thank you. Keep your lights on, Dicks. Because we’re coming back for you, more emboldened than ever. We won’t kill you. We won’t rape you, choke you, or cut anything off. But in our way — the right way — we’ll get you. All of you.

Did this change anything? Not really. The tone was consistent with that distant document that agitated so many, but after all that had happened, it now struck us as tepid. The message had lost its bite. This thing was out of their control — whoever they were. Bigger and more intense than them. Okay, there might have been an uptick in retro baggings — the kind that stuck to the original aims and targets — but they were just a part of the mix. Bag of Dicks kept its malicious momentum, veering in different directions, zigzagging, bleeding the lines, crossing the margins, jumping the shark, then turning back on itself. From the beginning to the present, it went from flashpoint, to groundswell, to holy-shit-this-might-truly-be-the-antidote, right up to the tipping point of tolerance, with a view of acceptance, before falling out of fashion with the conscionable population, getting purloined on all sides, and descending into what can now be described as a manmade disaster.

In its early days, and its pioneering spirit, the bag solution appeared overseas only in fits and spurts. In its broader, more anarchic usage, however, it has become America’s chief export. The Russians have grabbed hold of the idea, and are sacking dissidents in the former Soviet states. Complainers in Venezuela are discovering the same fate. Barcelona’s La Rambla is routinely dotted with bags containing Catalan separatists, sometimes alive but more often dead. All over Africa, warring factions are carrying their butchered and bagged victims on sticks, and roasting them alive on spits. The Taliban is following America’s lead for once. So are football (not “soccer,” you Yank twits) hooligans throughout and across the British Isles, running amok again after a long period of restraint. In the Philippines, Duterte’s hoods are still roving the streets, killing as they see fit; that hasn’t changed, but the bags of body parts are a new spin. From India, we’re hearing of the triumphant return of the Thuggees, the long-dormant marauders who rob and strangle — and now, cloak in bags made from tied-together scarves — villagers and travelers in the name of Mother Kali, the goddess of destruction; it seems their country isn’t big enough for them any more, as they’re spilling into Nepal and Bangladesh, and to Europe by plane. A slightly less pernicious rendering: it’s a standardized sanction, before execution, in Singapore for lower-level crimes like spitting, littering, or neglecting to flush the toilet.

For the supreme leaders of China, Iran, and other heavy-handed regimes, the bag bacchanal is a convenient illustration of the intrinsic fallacy of democracy. The United States thinks it’s the world’s moral authority, huh? Please. See what happens when you give power to the people? Is this what you want? No, of course not. This is why you need a central authority telling you how to think, and how to behave. Hail to the monarch! Three cheers for totalitarianism! Yay despots!

This, from Kim Jong Un: “The imperialist aggressors have turned their weapons on themselves. We will soon celebrate their oblivion.”

Back on this turf, we’re living in the denouement to this dark story. Bag of Dicks is a scourge; nevertheless, it persists. It’s the undercurrent to everything. We can’t stop beating each other up and cancelling each other out. Law enforcement has no multilateral endorsement. Order is indistinguishable from bipolar disorder. There is no discussion, no debate, no invigorating exchange of contrasting points of view. To speak for or against anything is an act of courage or suicide — you can frame it either way. We can’t trust. Can’t get intimate. Can’t make ourselves vulnerable in pursuit of deeper relationships. Can’t join hands, or make sense of the idle ones. Can’t put our heads together for the greater good, for fear of the graver bad. Can’t agree to disagree. “Do unto your neighbor” has a sinister implication. Running for office is a danger, too much of a risk; for that matter, so is voting. Facebook has lost most of its friends. There are no storms on Twitter. The comments sections are conspicuously blank. We don’t share a damn thing — neither the glimpses of our lives, nor the experiences in common. The pleasantries are unexchanged, the emails unclicked, the signs unwritten, the campaigns unproduced, the speeches unspoken, the aphorisms undelivered, the journalists unemployed, the artists unsubsidized, the original expressions of thought unrecorded. All the horrible people? They stand uncorrected. We’re looking out, watching our backs, and giving passersby the side-eye. We’re hiding. Because every time we step outside — to walk to class, go to work, drive to the store, get a bite, grab a drink, catch the show, or take a trip — there’s the very fair chance we’ll see a bag, or a collection of bags, lying still, or in the tragicomic throes of why-am-I-here, with a stranger inside, or someone we know, or used to know and possibly even like, or maybe, just maybe, that bag is coming for us, or someone like us, or someone we like or love, and whom, therefore, to preserve what we have and hold dear, we pretend not to like or love so we don’t, somehow, inadvertently, put the crosshairs on them, or on us, or on anyone in any way connected to us or them.

Who knows. This might just be a blip. As long as it’s lasted, this could be an episode that only feels protracted because we’re still in it. Right now, though, on this day, every day, the American experiment feels like a hypothesis that isn’t proving out. Our values smell more and more like coarse fabric damp with adrenaline, pheromones, and apocrine sweat — or like the tired, poor, huddled masses fished out of the Rio Grande. Individualism is selfish. Freedom is feckless. Equality equates to a relentless tit-for-tat. What a painful enlightening, in which the cost of the impatience among our ranks is illuminated, irradiated, and blasted through our retinas, frying our lobes to a crisp; the arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice, well, someone (or some many) tried to shorten its trajectory because it was taking too damn long. And this is where that gets us. One nation, under Hobbes, with liberty and community for none.

Let’s end, for now, on this image: a crush of, oh, fifty ravenous stereotypes of the unwashed hoi polloi descending upon a helipad on Orcas Island, a habitable rock in Washington’s top left corner. They tackle the billionaire futurist — a visionary responsible for giant leaps in artificial intelligence and automated labor — before he can get to his doomsday bunker, and wrestle him into a bulk bag meant for coffee beans. Out of this commotion, the helicopter takes off again. It tilts, pauses, spins, and jolts in a precarious journey to a spot above Puget Sound. The bag falls, falls, falls, splashes, and disappears underwater. Then the chopper, with unskilled pilots competing for the controls, goes down in exactly the same location. Bigger splash. More men down.

We see them, all of them, for what they are. And we keep the epitaph to ourselves.