The Weird History of USAmerican Fascism: A Guide (1979-2019) PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory 2019 M.C. McGrady Summary The future, as ever, can be read in comic books. Foretold by the Dark Age of Comics, the doom that now comes to Earth arrives in the form of self-realizing eschatologies, horrors born out of the rutting between unfettered capitalism and its favorite child, technological hubris. When the Big Two comic book publishers began hiring British and Irish authors en masse over the course of the 1980s, these writers brought with them a critical eye sharpened by the political and economic cruelty of the decade. The victims of the Iron Lady came to the New World and set their sights on the empire of the Teflon President, using superhero stories to explore the ideological weapons deployed in the service of global capitalism. The Weird History of USAmerican Fascism tracks the interrelated networks of popular culture and fascism in the United States to demonstrate the degree to which contemporary USAmerican politics embodies the future that the fictional dystopias of the past warned us about. Although the trans-Atlantic political developments of 2016 and their aftermath have sparked a widespread interest in a resurgent Anglophone fascism and its street-level movements – seen most obviously in the loose collection of white supremacists known as the ‘alt- right’ – this interest has been hamstrung by the historical aversion to a serious study of popular and ‘nerd’ culture during the twentieth century. By paying attention to the conceptual and interpersonal networks that emerged from the comic books and videogames of the 1980s, The Weird History of USAmerican Fascism fills a critical lacuna in cultural theory while correcting recent oversights in the academic analysis of contemporary fascism, providing an essential guide to the past, present, and future of the bizarre world of USAmerican politics. i Contents Summary ….. i Contents ….. ii Notes on Style ….. iii Prologue I: The End of the Old World ….. 1 II: The Ignorant Leading the Uninformed ….. 8 III: The War for Imaginationland ….. 13 IV: Your Expert Friend ….. 21 V: A Guide to Guides ….. 25 Glossary ℵ ….. 32 Ages ….. 56 Blowback ….. 70 Bricolage ….. 74 Bullshit ….. 81 Comic books ….. 84 Gawker ….. 92 Glurge ….. 95 Golem ….. 105 Grift ….. 108 Smarm ….. 113 Tulpa ….. 115 Ultra ….. 121 Weird ….. 131 Case Study 1: The Kept Weird ….. 143 Case Study 2: Magical Materialism in USAmerican Politics ….. 151 Case Study 3: The Real Heroes, or, ACAB ….. 163 Epilogue ….. 173 Bibliography ….. 177 ii Notes on Style This project is presented in a Chicago style that has been adapted where appropriate. In cases where media do not have specific citation guidelines in the official stylebook (comic books, videogames, social media posts), this project has adopted its own format based on extant best practices. Specifically, the thesis uses the following abbreviations in its citations to refer to the different roles that go into making a comic book: (w) for writer, (p) for penciller, (i) for inker, (a) for artist where the same individual is responsible for pencilling, inking, and/or colouring, (c) for colourist, and (l) for letterer. American English is used except in direct quotations, and single quotation marks (aka ‘inverted commas’) are used with punctuation appearing after the closing mark. When not referring to a specific individual, the singular pronouns they/them are used. iii Prologue I: The End of the Old World The history offered here focuses on a particular time period (1979-2019) primarily out of narrative convenience. This history must as a matter of course address events and processes that extend beyond 1979, although that year does happen to include enough events of specific interest to mark it as a useful point from which to orient this narrative. At the same time, this text does not offer a singular narrative of the history in question, but rather a hypertextual application of critical historiography to specific topics, arranged alphabetically in the Glossary, which constitutes the bulk of the project. This non-linear historicizing of a particular discourse is in the service of this project’s overarching goal, which is (admitting at the outset the difficulty of such a task) overcoming the contemporary resurgence of fascism by equipping readers with the critical tools necessary to resist and dismantle USAmerican fascism’s discursive weapons, otherwise known as myths. This prologue serves to make clear the stakes of such a project, and convince you, the reader, of my authority to speak on such matters. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (and eventual election) generated in certain circles the widespread sensation that something has changed. ‘This is not normal’ became a rallying cry for stunned white liberals, and the bewilderment at how such events could come to pass – in the United States of all places – was regarded in polite society not as an embarrassing admission of one’s own ignorance and culpability regarding the logical outcome of a petrophiliac colonial empire dismantling its domestic democratic institutions through neglect and attack, but rather a marker of moral authority, a sign that one has both the ethical chops to recognize the horrors this administration might birth and the kind of faith in the inherent goodness of the United States to imagine that he represents an aberration. This notion, that Trump represents something uniquely awful, is of course for US citizens a comforting myth, as the United States has since its inception always been a horrifying blight, a patriarchal slave state whose national identity is inextricable from the oceans of blood left in its wake. In this light, ‘USAmerica’ is used in lieu of the metonymic use of ‘America’, an abbreviation that equates the country with the whole of two continents, born of a 1 colonial rhetoric that applies the Monroe Doctrine’s implicit assumption that these continents are ultimately subject to the authority of the United States. In this context, ‘America’ is a myth in the service of USAmerica’s imperial violence. Secondly, USAmerican is used in lieu of the shorter USian to emphasize this project’s overarching assessment of the United States, which is that it should not exist; the clumsiness of the term reflects the degree to which the United States is an imperfect imposition, something distasteful, that should ultimately be discarded.1 The claim that the Trump administration is ‘not normal’ is a moral and historical claim, both of which fail to stand up under the kind of investigation this project performs. This text presupposes that the United States government circa 2019 can be intuitively described as fascist, and argues that fascism is by 2019 now inherent to the United States, as a consequence of the post-World War II USAmerican empire on the one hand and the ecological disaster it insists on maintaining on the other. That is to say, the text argues that defeating fascism in the United States (at this point) necessarily means an end to the collective political and cultural identity that is ‘the United States’, alongside other material changes to that land currently under the control of the US empire. As with many of the terms in the Glossary and its use of ‘popular culture’ throughout, this project uses ‘fascism’ first and foremost in a colloquial sense, not from a lack of critical rigor, but because the usage that matters most in the fight against fascism is always the vernacular.2 While fascism is not in actuality populist, it adopts the terms of popular discourse to justify itself, and it is in this arena that it must be confronted. At the same time, this project does have a legitimate historical and theoretical basis for describing the United States as fascist in purely descriptive terms (and not 1 Less crucial, but still relevant, is the way reading the term as a compound of ‘USA’ and ‘merica’ brings to mind first the chants that tend to erupt at rallies and campaign events – ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’ – and second the kind of affected pronunciation half-seriously applied to expressions of patriotism among (ostensibly) lower-class white USAmericans post-9/11, with ‘Merica’ sometimes shortened even further to ‘Merka’. At least some of the popularity of this affectation can be attributed to the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, both in their long-running television series South Park and their film Team America: World Police, the latter of which features the song ‘America, Fuck Yeah’, sung in an alt-rock voice that renders ‘America’ closer to ‘Merka’. 2 For this reason, the project mostly avoids discussions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture when discussing ‘popular’ culture, even as it does take the time to acknowledge historical differences regarding the way certain media have been received. Furthermore, because this project is interested in the weird corners of USAmerican culture, many of the pop culture artefacts it addresses have – in pure numbers – relatively small audiences, even while their specific media (comic books, videogames, etc.) are colloquially understood to be part of ‘pop culture’. 2 merely as an insult aimed a political opponent, for example). Specifically, a brief consideration of the term will demonstrate how the contemporary United States neatly and self-evidently corresponds to most of the features of what Umberto Eco calls ‘ur-fascism’ in his 1995 essay of the same name, written as a reflection of his own experience of fascism in Italy. In ‘Ur-Fascism’, Eco describes fascism as a game, with different variations bearing a ‘family resemblance’ born from their being ‘fastened to some archetypal foundations’.3 Recognizing that certain terms (such as Nazism) are historically distinct, Eco nevertheless argues that ‘Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist’.4 Eco identifies fourteen ‘features’ of ‘Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism’, any one of which need ‘be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it’.5 Without considering each of these fourteen features in detail one may note that more than one of them are considered throughout this text.