Frenzies of Renown

From the archives. Originally posted at                       

...And What Will Be Left of Them?,  January, 2011.  

"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer. And Andrew Witwer shot John Burlingham. And John Burlingham shot Edward R. Darlington. And Edward R. Darlington shot Valerie Gerry. And Valerie Gerry shot Olga Giddy. And Olga Giddy shot..."      - J.G. Ballard, “The Generations of America"  

"The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep."    - Lance Loud

Altamont, post-Tet Vietnam, the Manson trail, Attica, skyjackings on an almost daily basis, economic decline.

What the hell happened? It wasn't supposed to be like this, living in America in the late twentieth century. The economic affluency and social certainty of the post-War boom, the ascendant "American Way of Life" of a decade prior was pointing to another horizon, to an entirely different future. The outlook of that era couldn't have been more optimistic, more assuring.

The era-defining visual artist of that earlier, not-too-distant past had been Andy Warhol. He had his eye on the essence of the times. Everyone now knows the artist's Greatest Hits -- the ersatz arrays of soup cans, Brillo boxes, gunslinging Elvises, etcetera. All the flat, emblematic, serialized signifiers and mass-produced objects of a new, modern consumerist society blankly mirrored back to itself. But behind all the sharp and glimmering surfaces of those objects lay a shadow; that shadow being death -- death imported into the fabric of modern life in new and improved ways. There was the enshrinement of the suicided sex symbol screen star, then the First Lady in numbed and unimaginable shock after a certain fateful day in Dallas. Death, death and still more death as it played out in newspapers, movies, television. State-mandated death by electric chair, and self-actualized death from leaping off of a skyscraper. Death in car crashes, in plane crashes, and lurking in tainted tins of tuna fish.

Warhol's series of Marilyn Monroes and Jackie O's and the like are among the Greatest Hits; but most of the later iconography that appeared in his work in the years that followed is the stuff that now merits a mere footnote, perhaps because it it struck too dissonant and dour of a chord at the time. Ignore it not, a definite morbid undercurrent seemed to be amassing, becoming a recurrent theme. Maybe even pointing to a sort of symbolic ossuary that was gradually piling up under the surface of the glimmering and sleekly designed banality of modern life.

But perhaps one can invoke only so much death and morbidity before fate itself reciprocates by finding a place for you in its Rolodex. For Warhol, death would arrive one June afternoon in 1968 in the form of three slugs from a .32 calibre pistol, the pistol wielded by disgruntled and deranged ex-associate Valerie Solanas. Although he was briefly and officially declared dead by doctors after the shooting, Warhol managed to survive the attack.

Andy's chest

In his 1975 autobiography, Warhol would write, "In the '60s everybody got interested in everybody. In the '70s everybody started dropping everybody. The '60s were clutter. The '70s are very empty." In the end, he was most likely talking about himself. After the shooting, Warhol began living a more guarded and less accessible existence. And it's been argued that with the '70s-being-very-empty remark, Warhol may as well have ben speaking solely of or for himself, if only because it perfectly sums up the artists's career from that point onward.

No more art with a grim or ironically critical subtext. The 'seventies for Warhol were the decade in which making art meant making money, and the artist found that he could do this by simply resting on his laurels, settling into a formulaic signature style, and cranking out portraits of celebrities, socialites, and wealthy collectors.¹  He'd also spend the decade toadying to glamorous and powerful patrons (among whom could be counted Empress Farah Dibah Pahlavi and her husband, the Shah of Iran), and hanging out with the likes of Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli at Max's KC or Studio 54. And then there was launch of his own show-biz/society magazine Interview, a publication devoted to aimless chit-chat with people who were famous, or angling to become famous.

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One good way to become famous in America during the 1970s was to shoot somebody who was famous. Preferably an elected official. You didn't need a political motive. The target didn't have to be someone who was especially beloved by the public. You didn't even need to be a decent enough marksman to properly finish them off. None of that mattered, because it still made for good theater. Ask Arthur H. Bremer. A socially maladjusted and marginally employable young man hailing from Milwaukee, Bremer originally set out to shoot president Richard Nixon (who was running for re-election in 1972), but wound up shooting would-be Democratic contender George Wallace, instead.

Wallace, for those who need a reminder, was the two-term governor of the state of Alabama. In the prior decade, he’d attained notoriety for having opportunistically opposed desegregation. He'd physically blocked enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama in 1963, and had defiantly proclaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." In 1972, he was making his third bid for the presidency, this time running on the Democratic ticket. Regarded as the "Spoiler from the South" by the press, Wallace had proven a formidable contender. He was, by one journalist's description, "a Southern populist of the meanest streak," and in 1972 he posed a considerable threat to both the Democratic ticket and to president Richard Nixon. On the campaign trail, he stumped on a staunch law-and-order plank, and vociferously decried the increased liberalism, civil disorder, and "moral decay" of the 1960s. All of which met with a warm welcome with Nixon’s "silent majority."

Wallace, squaring off with the feds at the University of Alabama in 1963

Wallace's run for the White House was, of course, troubling for some Americans. Even though by 1972 he'd denounced his prior pro-segregationist platform, Wallace proved that he wasn't above exploiting the racial tensions surrounding the federally-mandated school busing program for his own political gain. His campaign speeches were the epitome of unbridled demagoguery -- podium-thumping screeds of anti-federal rhetoric aimed at the intrusive, do-gooder meddling of the "briefcase totting," "pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington," interlaced with mockery of a diffuse and unnamed elite of "hypocrites" and "intellectual snobs" who reputedly shaped the nation’s social and economic policies.

To the alarm of many in the press and public at large, Wallace’s message found a broad and receptive audience, particularly among disenfranchised or alienated blue-collar and middle-class voters. On the campaign trail he met with enthusiastic and overflowing crowds when he appeared at rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan. Covering the Democratic primaries for Rolling Stone magazine, journalist Hunter S. Thompson declared, "George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics," further observing: "But there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. ...The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it -- but what then?" The danger, Thompson recognized, was that Wallace was ultimately "stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel."²

Not that any of that mattered to Artie Bremer, he was just looking to make a name for himself. He'd first set out with Richard Nixon in mind as his target. For weeks he shadowed Nixon's campaign stops, chronicling his journeys in a diary as he went. Hapless and unfocused in his stalking, there was one aspect of his task that he was deeply attentive to -- his appearance. Bremer wanted to make sure he did the job in style. He didn't want to be taken for some disheveled loser or -- even worse -- some sort of hippie. He put a great deal of thought and effort into his wardrobe and his grooming in order to meet each opportunity to shoot the president looking like a normal, clean-shaven, patriotic citizen.

Bremer, photographed by security at a pair of rallies in the late spring of 1972

At one point, spying Nixon’s car outside the American embassy in Ottawa, Bremer realized that he had been caught by surprise and wasn't properly dressed for the occasion. He dashed back to his hotel room to change and smart himself up, returning to the embassy to find that Nixon had already departed. Furious with himself, he wrote in his diary:

“I wanted to shock the shit out of the [Secret Service] men with my calmness. .... All these things seemed important to me, were important to me, in my room. I will give very little if ANY thought to these things on my future attempts. After all does the world remember if Sirhan’s tie was on straight?”

Yet, attending a Nixon rally a day later, he witnessed the same Secret Service personnel targeting rank-and-file protesters, and noted incredulously, "WOW! If I killed him while wearing a sweatty tee-shirt, some of the fun & Glamore would defionently be worn off [sic x 4]."

But eventually Bremer did draw the attention of Nixon's security detail, which prompted him to quickly change plans. After briefly considering Democratic frontrunner George McGovern, he instead set his sights on Wallace. In his diary, Bremer bemoaned the diminished media coverage his lower-profile target would attract, yet that didn’t dissuade him from contemplating what sort of clever one-liner he'd deliver before pulling the trigger.³  Within a week of trailing Wallace, he shouldered through the crowd in a shopping center parking lot in suburban Laurel, Maryland, approaching the candidate as he shook hands with supporters after a campaign speech. At close range, he emptied his revolver, shooting Wallace four times and critically injuring three bystanders.

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In much the same way that acts of terrorism are efforts to intervene in the machinations of history or global politics by way of the "communicability of images" that surround such events, so too can an attempted assassination -- no matter how botched or incoherently motivated -- be regarded as an effort to disrupt the hierarchy of society’s symbolic order. If political assassinations in the U.S. of the 1960s were unanimously spoken of in terms of martyrdom and "national tragedy," then in the decade that followed they often took on an element of absurdity. Perhaps it comes down to the power of contemporary cultural myths, and the deflation of same that transpired in the 1970s. One such myth being that in a supposedly classless society any citizen could "grow up and become President." If anything, the 1960s and 1970s provided frequent reminders that, instead, it was much easier to be the person who grew up to take a shot at the President.

As with Warhol, George Wallace survived the shooting; although the attack would derail his bid for the presidency and leave him a paraplegic for the remainder of his life. Arthur Bremer would receive his desired 15 minutes of fame, which ended up translating into a 65-year prison term. Upon sentencing, Bremer reportedly told the court, "Looking back on my life I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself."

Shortly thereafter, somewhere on the West Coast, aspiring screenwriter Paul Schrader wasn’t doing so well. Estranged from his wife and living out of his car, Schrader found himself contemplating the emotional effects of loneliness on the male psyche. He had also been reading Bremer's newly published diaries, and from there he got it in mind to write a script about an existentially adrift NYC cab driver. The resulting film, as we all know, would become a huge and controversial success a few years later -- controversial due to its brutally violent content as its use of a former Disney child actress playing the role of a twelve-year-old hooker. The actress was Jodie Foster, who would inspire an amorous fan from Colorado by the name of John Hinckley to begin plotting ways of gaining her attention.

"And Olga Giddy shot Rita Goldstein. And Rita Goldstein shot Bob Monterola. And Bob Monterola shot Barbara H. Nicolosi. And..."⁴

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NOTES:
1.  This was, as art critic Matthew Collings has called it, Warhol's "'doing uncritical portraits of anyone who could pay' period."

2.  It's been argued that Wallace was an early pioneer of the contemporary "politics of rage" -- the backlash rhetoric that has been the primary parlance of the culture war waged by American conservative movement over the past 3 decades. It was for this reason that historian Dan T. Carter declared Wallace "the most influential loser in twentieth-century American politics."

3.  In keeping with the culture of paranoia of the era, the legitimacy of Bremer's diary (as quickly rushed into print in book form) met with skepticism. There were at the time a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the attempt of Wallace’s life -- theories hailing from both the Left and the Right ends of the political spectrum. Numerous sources have it that in the hours following the shooting, Nixon and his aides were scrambling to find a way to plant evidence that would tie Bremer to the campaign of Nixon's leading Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern. For this reason, the American author Gore Vidal would soon assert in the pages of the New York Review of Books that Bremer’s diaries were a fraud, alleging that that had been authored by one of Nixon's henchmen and planted among Bremer's belongings by the C.I.A.. But even in the last years of his life, Wallace would ask the White House to look into a high-level conspiracy leading to the failed assassination on his life. Who he expected to be behind any such conspiracy is anyone's guess, seeing how he'd already colluded with Nixon's Committee to Re-Elected the President to run as a Democrat (and thus a potential "spoiler" in the DNCrace) rather than as an Independent.

4.  All of which would become a history-repeated-as-farce trope in the early years of America in the 1970s. The '60s had seen a series of political assassinations and iconically martyred figures (JFK, Malcolm X,  Martin Luther King, RFK, et al.) as carried carried out by what can only be described as -- tragically and ironically -- successful marksmen. Whereas such high-profile attempts at assassinating U.S. figures in the 1970s often amounted to little more than incomprehensibly low-level figures (Wallace, Gerald Ford) being by targeted by the likes of Bremer and "Squeaky" Fromme. At the time it made n sense while making perfect sense -- the nonsense of it speaking fully about how many people felt about the state of Americans society at the time. 

In response to what Simon sez, to which (for starters) I'd add the above.*

The last bit (text) comes courtesy of the artist known as Momus from his recently published The Book of Scotlands. Of which version 158 too much reminds me of what might otherwise pass for "Origins of Modern American Regional Cuisine, Chapter 3: The Deep South."


Not that any of this hs anything to to do with the vote, of course.

The Ownership Society

"The peculiar psychopathology, or 'culture,' of the poor was (and still is) thought to be defined by two related traits: 'present time orientation' and an insufficiently developed 'deferred gratification pattern' (or 'DGP,' as some sociologists put it handily). In simpler words, the poor person lived for the moment, unable to think ahead, to save or to plan for the future. These were the very opposite of the traits the middle class liked to ascribe to itself -- self-discipline, a strong super-ego, an ability to plan ahead to meet self-imposed goals, and so forth. [...]

Leaving aside the psychiatric jargon, a person who lives entirely in the present, unable to wait for the next anticipated pleasure, is, of course, a child. The conceit of the poor as children has an ancient, aristocratic heritage. In mid-[twentieth]century America, it was bolstered by the perception of poverty as a vestigial condition, something 'left over' that did not really belong in an affluent, modern world. Mass poverty seemed to belong in the historical past; along with the Depression, sweatshops, dirt farms, labor struggles. And what belongs in the historical past is easy to confuse with the personal past -- which is, for all of us, childhood. The invented poor, the inhabitants of the culture of poverty, were not so much 'present-oriented' as trapped in the past, unable or unwilling to 'grow up,' as the middle class had, into the ever-available, up-to-date affluence."

[ source ]

Kicking Off, Kicking Over

Well sure, there's a little too much truth in this little snarky item, but let's be fair...you pretty much needed the internet to get any decent discussion of what was going on in Egypt. Or at least you did in the U.S., with broadcast media being what it is. That latter sort of coverage mostly amounting to little more than skipping from points A to P without taking any time to analyze or discuss any of the nuances or context-specific intricacies. Point A being unreflective jubilance at seeing democracy usurp tyranny, and P being the fear-mongering about the Muslim Brotherhood. The former was the usual self-congratulatory end-of-history triumphalist rigmarole; the latter being the standard cynical ploy for racking up viewership by playing the alarmist/paranoia card, irrespective of actual socio-historic fact (such as: the peculiar role that the military plays in Egyptian society, and the fact the MB has its own credibility issues with much of the populace).

But the most annoying cliche of the week-plus had to be all the incessant and wildly hyperbolic banter about the role of social media in all of this. As if it was the prime catalyst, the overarching means to this end. To which one can only roll their eyes and say: Oh, pleeeease.

At any rate, in the face of all that, it was refreshing to read Paul Mason's bit at the BBC, "Twenty Reason Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere." As Mason warns, his list is quite off-the-cuff and generalized. Still, it's one the most sensible and salient things I've read on the matter so far. Of course, it doesn't only pertain to what's transpired in Egypt, but also elsewhere, including Greece and the UK. And there's perhaps some devils lurking in the details which might be pertinent to other major countries, as well. Take, for example, the following items....

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future.

[. . .]

9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.

10. This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.

11. To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

Ahem.

Consider the numbers of the newly DIS-employed we've seen these past couple years. And not much being done about it, despite all the talk. So: what was done to the working classes for decades has lately been done to the American middle classes -- and lately many of the latter have been shocked to discover that they too are expendable, only so much surplus human capital in the global free-market economy. But this situation brings -- or eventually will bring -- certain issues to the table in a big way. Because as goes the middle class, so goes a huge potion of the nation's tax base; as well the largest demographic block of voters. At which point, some giant mutant chickens are going to come home to roost. Because let's face it: If there's been one thing that has proven most disruptive to the neoliberalist narrative in recent years, it's been how China has proven that -- contrary to all previous presumptions and known formulae -- yes, there is and can be such a thing as authoritarian state capitalism. At which point certain folk may have to divest themselves of certain notions and ruses, certain illusions. The end result being that maybe the U.S. will retire the last and the largest of its self-defining myths to the proverbial dustbin, and take a few pages from China's book.

One of Many Hobbies

An interesting riff from Simon Reynolds. Interesting because it squarely hits on some things I've had on my own mind for some time, and I'm intrigued to see that he more or less arrives at the same conclusion that I have. (And does so far more succinctly and eloquently, of course.)

Simon's responding to a happened-upon pair of posts (here and here), which caused him to share a few thoughts about the connection between politics, "digimodern" "pseudo-participations," and the shapings-up of contemporary cultural landscape. He also -- more specifically -- wonders if the blog author "is using the term 'spectacle' in the Guy Debord sense of the word or whether he's just fastened upon the word unawares of its applications."

I can definitely see why Simon would be curious, would wonder about a connection. At times, the phrasing at times ("The sign of ideology is the spectacle.") closely shadows that of Dubord & co., though I suspect it's by mere chance. I suspect the author of the posts in question just happened to chose that particular word to embody the concept he was crafting. After all, some have pointed out vague similarities between Debord's theory of the Spectacle and Daniel Boorstin's discussion (c. 1961) of "the Image." And my guess would be that what the blogger had in mind was probably more akin to the latter.