words:
ode to sacheen littlefeather
(aka: popular front celebrity tours with harvey levin and dante)
(aka: popular front celebrity tours with harvey levin and dante)
Somewhere between the second Punic war for the Mediterranean
and the ongoing total war for the terrarum orbis
from the caboose of Pax Americana, the most recent
industrial iteration populated by mythic nationalism real and imagined:
one wonders what has America inherited from empires past?
Deposited as historical material that lingers for generations
only to manifest as revolutionary political thought favoring
a bundle of sticks, crown and scepter, swords or plowshares.
Peace is an ironic way to describe imperialism; unless it also describes
the tension between individual submission and state authority.
This energetic potential is conserved kinetic force that can be triggered:
rebellion to revolution might be an inverse of submission to empire.
Both contain a version of peace
inherited from historical submission
to a higher power--Thebes, Athens, Rome or "europe";
the nominally determined "islam" or crusading catechism.
Uninvited guests leeching historical detritus.
Pax Romana built statues, walls aqueducts and triumphal arches from London to Chellah to Babylon
and also deposited the ides of March, stoic Marcus Aurelius, fiddling Nero and the Caligulan bacchanal
in the collective memory of metropolitan, colonist and colonized. People like you and me.
These shared memories are the foundation of an empirical culture which also includes the Greeks:
in lumpen culture: Achilles, Agamemnon and Hector are today as famous as the Justice League
and haute couture: Grecian urns are meditated upon and plays are mined for YouTube shorts
and genetic reality: children of Alexander are still conceived from Macedon to Tehran to Delhi.
the conquered--even Hannibal himself--are barely ghouls in morality plays and heroic journeys. Still,
Virgil's memory of Troy vis a vis Greek horses: "Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs"
and Rome's diplomatic subterfuge in Carthage: forcing the Third Punic War
reverberate as historical victory instead of embarrassment for emperors that follow:
*(Rhodes, Leopold Churchill and Bismarck)
and American policy from the Black Hills to the Philippines to Palestine
Richard the Lionheart studied as archetype by elites while citizens binge cop-drama.
Dante's Virgil visited the Theban brothers Ulysses and Diomede
receiving "penal tortures..." in hell for the "ambush of the horse..."
"...Which sow'd imperial Rome" [XXVI Canto]. This myth is embedded so deep
even the cop-dramas like Michael Bay's The Rock warn of the Greeks
*(luckily Greek Nicholas Cage came to his senses and freed empire fall-guy Sean Connery in the third act).
How does one defend against the inevitable deception of empire?
One Polybian lesson: Utican neutrality doesn't pacify bellicose states.
Empire is a cacophonous and orgiastic catastrophe:
from this ether and ore (and later blood and steel) heroes are minted imperial culture.
In a future hegemony--perhaps of silicone and carbon--
Allen Dulles, Queen Victoria, Cato the Younger and Ulysses are cohabitants
within a new pantheon where Americans, Europeans, Romans and Greeks are distant teachers
and a Chinese Virgil warns about small pox blankets during treaty negotiations.
Famously, after the young Americans revolted
the bellows of republican liberty, Adams and Jefferson, corresponded into their eighties
and died on the same Independence Day in 1826
during the Jackson administration--after the republic was ruined
first by partisanship and then by empire
continental; in New Orleans, Florida and Indiana
hemispheric; named for their successor Monroe
global; to the successors that would follow
(at the empire's maximum with impunity the Americans spied, violated treaties, stole elections, overthrew regimes, enslaved each other, dismissed women and lgbt, neuro-diverse; assassinated foreign leaders, defoliated forests for profit and war, stole babies, reeducated children, firebombed cities, bombed asprin factories, droned wedding parties; dissapeared foreign nationals, experimented on citizens, conscripted the structurally poor, imprisoned the mentally ill, dropped nukes
and poisoned the planet until the soil blew away, rivers caught on fire, rain melted stone and eventually a hole was chewed into the sky; so it goes)
and the country wears black and sniffs lilacs when a leader expires, years after the revolution died;
but there is never ritual ablution performed for the citizens-in-mourning
no incoming ruler ever exits the capitol, crosses over the metaphorical Rubicon (or literal Potomac) and disarms.
Without that step the emperor's death will never restore benign republican rule.
"Sic semper tyrannis," limped JW Booth--he thought he echoed Brutus.
The actor knew Shakespeare's Caesar (and Cato's) turned villain
only after the republic became empire
he conveyed it as a *(southern) republican in the imperial tongue.
This truth was clear in the Roman Senate, Globe Theater, Ford's Theater,
during America's mythical republican conception,
the revisionist antebellum adolescence and imperial reconstruction.
This collective truth became opaque cataract at the geriatric end of Pax Americana.
A glut of fabulous obituaries punctuate the revolutionary generation:
Lafayette might have been the last (versions of his are still being written)
and form a coherent national narrative all the way to Tom Brokaw:
the transcendentally eulogized fratricidal people
lawless gilded generation of boom-towns and robber barons
the reintegrated industrially educated, the talented-tenth and co-opted nationalism
and century of victorious military men who blurred reality and myth:
*(Pershing, Patton and MacArthur; Kurtz, Cathcart and Strangelove).
Here are the types of people that populate imperial memory:
bankers, politicians, police, soldiers...outlaws, artists and critics
individual exemplars of the the American pantheon
encoded within versions of empire that follow.
Mass media is an important feature of the industrial American epoch
entities like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hearst and Columbia Broadcasting Company
mastered the mode of production: integrated, monopolized, reproduced, streamlined
but--partly due to mass culture--this media produced more than sound, film and print.
A version of national celebrity--on par with orators, lawyers and soldiers--
sometimes stoked by embers of empirical memory--Fess Parker as Daniel Boone (or Davy Crockett); John Wayne at the Alamo
sometimes, an archetype: Sen. Jefferson Smith; Sgts. Joe Friday, Ernest Bilko; Pvts. Gomer Pyle and Leonard Lawrence
the same stories from Welles to Capra to Ford to Kubrick to Scorsese
dressing up as William Jennings Bryan; who was dressing up as Washington; who was dressing up as Cincinnatus
performing for the national audience.
Fame emerged from fame itself
imitation blurred, becoming distinct.
a Godfather longshoreman Zapata, executed in Rome on the ides of March and driven mad by "the horror" of Vietnam's Heart of Darkness.
One can only hope that Brando is America's lasting material contribution to empirical myth--our Incitatus
at least, perhaps, a contender *(and not Wayne's Ghengis Khan).
The Duke's belligerency toward Sacheen Littlefeather is
American empire distilled: cowboys and indians: ad absurdum.
It seems daily that fabulous, pre-written, obituaries of survivors broadcast
*(from left to right including Jane Fonda, Muhammad Ali, Robert Redford, John Voight, Charles Manson, Donald Rumsfeld).
The revolutionaries--metaphorical Abraham, Martin and John--
*(Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Harry T. Moore, William Lewis Moore, Medgar Evers and the freedom riders)
--were killed when they were young.
and a few--like Rosa Parks or Noam Chomsky--are caught, for different reasons, in a confused historiographical purgatory post mortem.
The rest--(from Frank Zappa to Squeaky Fromm to Jerry Rubin to Tom Hayden)--
were reeducated, employed, elected, disappeared, imprisoned, tenured, yuppified, or, comically, cosmetically altered just like everybody else who survived the decade without getting getting the Randle McMurphy/Rosemary Kennedy treatment from the offspring of James Engelton.
Strangely, from the caboose of the American century
it seems the public intellectuals
*(James Baldwin, Gloria Steinem, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.)
have less cultural resonance than
their contemporary vaudevillian analogue:
*(George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Cher, Carol Burnett, Robin Williams or Richard Pryor)
and neither competes in volume to the syndicated cache:
adjacent to and inspired by saccharine Norman Lear
*(Jimmy Walker, Emmanuel Lewis, Carroll O'Connor and Jaleel White)
and the aforementioned ubiquitous cop-dramas.
The American voices seemingly caught between Bertrand Russell and Michel Foucault
truth tellers within a system: *(Zinn, Ellsberg, Hersh, Gary Webb, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Amy Goodman)
are to Project Mockingbird in The Sixties what Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are to mass media today: self-aware prisoners.
Truth tellers from outside like Alan Moore
have their rights sold to the least creative people possible. Or
Michael Parenti--who already wrote the Peoples History of Caeser's assassination twenty years ago--
are ignored for more palatable thinkers at the papers of record. Or
the bravest leftists this side of Weather Underground:
Medea Benjamin and Code Pink--scream into the reverberating void.
the no-holds-barred fellow travelers--
*(AIM, BPP, WU, Abbie Hoffman, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis)
--began their journey with the same empirical historical material as all of us
but they get off at a different stop in a faraway place
where Daniel Shays, John Brown, Lucy Parsons, August Spies, Emma Goldman, EV Debs, Joe Hill and Big Bill Haywood tramped
sounds like a blast.
In living life there is a sweet spot is somewhere between Hendrix and Bowie--"the McQueen"
where one achieves notoriety and exits before lingering
or before the compromises of celebrity and empire are revealed
the abbreviated career--(or comparable agoraphobia of Salinger and Pynchon)--
might be the only way to survive fame before being discovered and discovering
a very thin temporal film between the Secret Six of Harper's Ferry and Ted Kaczynski
or the singular Janus-faced Benedict Arnold
fickle, unpredictable and impermanent...like the imperial forge.
The number of names in this cultural pantheon start to multiply
geometrically for every generation like Malthusian formulae for land rent
seemingly ad infinitum until one begins to wonder
how the next generation could possibly produce one more national treasure
(or anything at all) without the whole thing collapsing in on itself
a house built on sand or a Jenga tower set out on a card table.
Pax imperialism has always been a joke for nerds, but its not funny up close, beneath the foolish and unstable lean.
Except for the new purple masters who knew the game and had fun with it
*(Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Ken Kesey).
But they're dead now. Like the movable feast generation new Algonquins they succeeded
*(Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Hemingway, Mencken and London)
and the new American that raised them all: Samuel Clemens.
Without them, today there is no funny. And maybe there shouldn't be
laughter in a present wrapped by public intellectuals like
*(Norman Finklestein, Hedges, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Coates, al-Akkad and Caitlin Johnstone) is barbarous, savage and profane;
and misread as a dismissal of post-colonial teachers from Du Bois to Fanon to Said
not to mention the genocide. No one does anymore.
The rest is pastiche, audience capture, short ad-breaks and monthly subscription services
at the end of this maximal generation of the empire's zenith.
As for bellum americana, it seems fine as always--in retrospect.
The nomenclature is inadequate to describe
the cycles of revolution, creation, dispossession and imposition that it implies.
The modern zeitgeist portends a long historical period of ennui: rudderless and hopeless.
An ending sudden and absurd, non sequitur,
mirroring the joke about aristocrats in more ways than one
before the bread-less masses remember the collapsed bridge that hasn't been fixed
and there hasn't been a circus for a generation; the Colosseum is now a shopping mall
the post offices are condos; Fort Knox is empty and venture capital has bought and sold the commons.
a freight tanker jackknifed sideways in the Suez Canal.
photo credit:
Sacheen Littlefeather at 1973 Academy Awards. I lifted this photo from rarehistoricalphotos.com This site credits: (Wikimedia Commons / Mashable / Flickr / Pinterest / Britannica). This is an unlikely source for this photo.
Shakespeare:
Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I love Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him.