The Meaning of Nixon (final sources paper, December 2014) — an introduction

SOURCES PAPER
The Meaning of Nixon: Understanding the Watergate Presidency and the President

Stepan Serdiukov
AMST 501: Theory and Methods
December 19, 2014



You see a small doll with a big red nose. For some reason, you don't trust this seemingly innocent child's toy.
— Fallout 2



On August 9, 1974 a helicopter, best known as Marine One, took off the South Lawn of the White House and flew towards Andrews Air Force Base, carrying Richard Nixon, who has just become the first President of the United States to resign office. Such was the end for the presidency that started with a campaign promise to bring the nation together, and continued with the Cambodian bombing campaign, revealed in the leaked Pentagon Papers, Watergate break-in and subsequent investigation of misdeeds by Nixon administration officials, as well as the War on Drugs, a controversial set of government policies that continues to this day. The Nixon presidency has been described as a high point of American disillusionment with politics and since its conclusion has attracted an enormous amount of attention from historians.

As regards Nixon's policies, they, as is the case with any statesman, have become closely associated with his personality, rhetoric, and public image—and this, in turn, is being explored in popular culture, where the treatments of RMN range from a description of a toy in a 1998 role-playing video game quoted in the epigraph to this paper and full-length movies like the 2009 Frost/Nixon to an animated character on Futurama (where Nixon, as a living head in a jar connected to a giant robot's body, wins the presidency of Earth in the year 3000 and is re-elected in 3012) and Louis Szekely's line in a 2013 HBO standup comedy special Oh My God: “Today people are like, 'The president's kind of disappointing.' Really? Our president wept like an insane person and then got on a helicopter and flew away.”

The latter example is especially lucid, as it showcases the level of popular culture obsession with Nixon: the president didn't actually cry during his address to the nation, he did so during a last closed-door meeting with the senators (reported1 in the Washington Post on the day of his resignation). But the joke, conflating the two events and pushing them into the televised medium where they never belonged, and delivered through the perspective of someone who witnessed the events, even still mediated and not entirely qualified to judge them (Szekely was not even 7 years old at the time Nixon resigned) gives us the sense of immediacy and historical significance of what happened on August 9, 1974; and the sense of relief that the general public must have felt when the deed was finally done. This last humble hypothesis is at the very least corroborated by the words of Gerald Ford during his inauguration speech, given on the same day Nixon took off to California: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

The Nixon years are deeply ingrained in the American cultural memory, and there is little doubt that they have special meaning that can be explored through the framework of American Studies, because a presidency very easily provides for the points of intersection between disciplines that American Studies looks for. A presidency is only at surface a simple execution of political office and political will over a certain period of time. It engages the country's population in an intensive contest over the meaning of different concepts that a culture (in the sense of a “complex whole... acquired by man as a member of society” defined by the British anthropologist E. B. Tylor2) rests upon, not in the least leadership, responsibility, opportunity, and fairness, as well as the phenomenon of American presidency by itself. Thus, each four or eight years the culture is left with new material to reflect upon in the coming decades and centuries.

Presidential legacies present themselves in military, labor, legal, political, economic history, popular culture, public memory, and help shape the future legacies of many political leaders across the board.  The exceptional circumstances of Richard Nixon's term in office raised many questions about the meaning of the presidential authority and emphasized its importance in the establishing citizens' trust in the political system. Gerald Ford, the accidental successor, tried to reassure the anxious public not only that the nightmare was over, but also that “our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” Such phrasing only emphasized the fact that the people still looked up to men, not systems, or at least put in men the greater part of their trust in the system.

What happened in the Nixon years is well known (with the notorious exception of the 18½ minutes missing from the White House tape). The answer to the question why it happened, what forces and impulses contributed Nixon's decision making and his approach to the American public, is not confined to one field of study. Interdisciplinary approach to the meaning of Nixon appears to be the most natural one. Studies of popular culture, for example, are significant because their subject does not merely reflect the contemporary social or political reality, but has power to influence its consumers, be that elites or citizens. As Melani McAlister argues in her book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, “the boundaries between the national and the international spheres, between culture and politics, between state actors and transnational flows, and between cultural analysis and policy history are far more porous than previous academic divisions of labor have recognized.” McAlister suggests that we “explain the coincidence' that brings specific cultural products into conversation with specific political discourses.” Several articles cited at the end of this paper suggest such an approach not only in studying Nixon through his image in the contemporary cinema, but also how his consumption of popular culture sometimes influenced his decision-making.

Another potentially effective approach to studying Nixon's legacy is through working-class history. In the conclusion of his book Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870—1920, Roy Rosenzweig makes an observation that “one of the persistent myths about late nineteenth century America (and other eras of our past as well) has been the notion that most people accepted the same general package of beliefs and values.” He then goes on to criticize the simplified picture of a unitary “American culture.” Rosenzweig's book first came out in 1983, just nine years after the Nixon presidency ended, and now, it being safely an “era of our past”, we can make the case that the studies of the 1970s working-class culture and labor history could give significant insights into the meaning of RMN. After all, part of his electoral success was owed to the breaking up the New Deal coalition, which included white working-class voters. By studying how Nixon inspired them to vote for him twice, and exploring what fears and hopes they were facing in the 1970s, we may find yet more points of intersection between politics and cultural practices.

The issues of national identity are situated at such intersection: each politician appeals to it, and through each interaction with his electorate, helps add new meanings to it, by creating cultural texts in almost all the mediums possible. Leila Zenderland, in her analysis of John Everett's account of a 1954 UNESCO meeting on Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (defining everyone's right to participate in the cultural life of the community), points out that the understandings of “American culture” at the time were and still are intertwined with larger debates over the American national identity.

One aspect of these debates has been recurrent in the U.S. political scene for over a hundred years, though the concept only emerged in the 1920s: the issue of American exceptionalism. Its interpretations have served to rationalize the certain foreign policy moves and military interventions, as well as talking points for countless public officials and media figures.

Richard Nixon's appeals to America's leadership role in the world during his tenure as Vice President, his shadow campaigning against Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and 1968, and his presidency, contributed to the discourse of exceptionalism—which is, in turn, a part of the American Studies discourse on the transnational influence of American culture. Nixon's dealings with the Soviet Union are particularly interesting in this respect: the famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate” with Nikita Khrushchev about the merits of capitalism and communism consumer cultures pushed quite a few hot buttons of the Soviet ideology czars: in the USSR, it was broadcast only late in the night, with quite a few of Nixon's remarks left untranslated. When Nixon was resigning office in 1974, the official Soviet historiography presented his departure as “yet another sign of a deep crisis of the bourgeois political system,” whereas the dissenters within the Soviet Union saw in Nixon's fall precisely what Gerald Ford tried to attribute to it in is first speech as the 38th president of the United States: that the American democracy still was viable, and everyone was equal before the law.

The transnational meaning of Nixon is, thus, a viable research topic, too: how his presidency contributed to the image of American power and the perception of capitalism in another countries, is a question that adds new dimensions to the legacy of the “brilliant and tormented” man that once occupied the White House.

The Southern System (midterm paper, October 2014)

MIDTERM PAPER: THE SOUTHERN SYSTEM
Stepan Serdiukov
AMST 465: The Culture of the American South
October 29, 2014


The antebellum South was home not to one, but to several peculiar institutions. According to Joel Williamson's book The Crucible of Race, Southerners strived to create and then maintain “an ideal, unitary order of masters and slaves, whites and blacks... an 'organic' society, in which people would know their own places.” This unitary order, as Heidi Beirich and Andy Hicks note in Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (Uni. of Texas Press, 2009), was often compared to a human body, where “the head would not want to be the heart, and the hand would not pine to be the head” (Williamson). However, like the human organism, this system was hardly “unitary”—it consisted by many cultural practices and sub-institutions. The purpose of this paper is to study them, and to analyze their effectiveness in maintaining the desired order in the South.

Slavery, the cornerstone institution of the system, ceased to exist in 1865. However, it did not collapse under its own weight: economically, slavery was viable as long as the cotton industry of the South continued to be such. In the decades before the Civil War, the price of cotton was growing constantly, and it represented more than half of all US exports. Only the war put an end to it.

Of course, one can argue that slavery was living on borrowed time anyway, since in order to perpetuate the cotton trade, slaveholders had to acquire more land to start new plantations, and this would have required endless addition of the new territories to the slave system, which was already meeting staunch opposition in the face of abolitionists and the new Republican Party, representing free people who did not want to compete with free labor in the new territories. The pro-expansion sentiment was high enough even to encourage the conquest of other countries, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, as described in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, and relatively recently satirized in a 2004 mockumentary C. S. A.: The Confederate States of America.

Still, slavery managed to persevere for more than two hundred years in North America, and for seventy-nine years in the United States. Slavery's direct legacy, the segregation, almost outlasted its “parent” in the South. What made the system last so long and gain so much advocates, some of whom were not even slaveholders? Part of the answer to this question lies within the system of slavery itself. Bondage amounted to social death. The dehumanizing effect of chattel principle is well-described by Walter Johnson in Soul By Soul: “Any slave's identity might be disrupted as easily as a price could be set and a piece of paper passed from one hand to another.” Johnson gives an astonishing statistic: of the two-thirds of interstate slave sales before the war, half involved the destruction of a family, and twenty-five percent destroyed a person's first marriage. Moreover, a slaveowner could threaten his property with such death in the form of sale. Physical death happens once, but the social death could come again and again, and finally result in an actual death, which was very likely if a slave was sold to a plantation in the deep South.

Such disruption of  slave communities was well-suited to the purpose of making a human into a product and to deprive him of ability to organize—essentially, conspire—with other humans. Slave escapes were almost as rare as rebellions. As to the latter, another factor should be taken into account. White to slave population ratio in the United States was very high, unlike in British West Indies (7 slaves to 1 white person) or Haiti (11 to 1), or Latin America. According to John Blassingame, who offers this estimate in his 1972 book The Slave Community, American bondsmen were at a huge disadvantage because of it. Additionally, the better trained, better equipped and more numerous regular military forces and militias could always come to the planter's rescue in the US, using a transportation network far more developed than in Brazil or Cuba. Superior firepower of whites was a serious deterrent to any decisive mass action by slaves. Only nine revolts happened in America between 1692 and 1865.

“Through care and discipline, slaves' bodies were physically incorporated with their owners' standards of measure,” Johnson writes. He quotes several slave narratives that mention the masters taking special care of the slaves' physical well-being since the early age. One mistress “used to call us children up to the big house and give us a dose of garlic and rue to keep us “wholesome,” as an ex-slave John Brown remembered it. The reason for this was purely economic: so the children “grow likely for the market.” Denying a person his or her very personhood, one's “intelligibility” in the social relations system, had a devastating effect, and served the slavers' purposes well. A human being torn away from everything dear and committed to everyday mechanical scrutiny related to his or her “market likeliness” was supposed to be easier to manage, to reformat in many ways that a planter saw fit. Thus, a fear of sale was always a major concern for a slave, again, making it dangerous to form a meaningful network of interpersonal relationships, for he or she might get severed from it at any given moment.

So slavery was held together by a series of means of psychological coercion via threats of social death, and physical abuse directed at its subjects, the bondsmen and women. But it is important to pay attention to a different brick in a Southern pyramid—or, rather, the cement that held the larger construction together. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a prominent historian of the American South, calls it the rule of honor, and maintains that it long preceded the slave system in the region. Rule of honor was “inseparable from hierarchy and entitlement,” and thus “required the rejection of the lowly, the alien, and the shamed” (Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.) To illustrate this point, Wyatt-Brown turns to a literary source, Hawthorne's short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” in which a young man named Robin, hoping to find advancement under the protection of the eponymous kinsman, comes to see him in Boston, only to find that the man was dishonored and is being given a ride of shame out of town. Robin finds himself coerced in laughing at the major, and thus is accepted into society. The story is set in 1732, so according to Wyatt-Brown, the honor system, with its importance of self-worth, the public evaluation of this self-image, and the triumph of the primal ritual over codified law, was once present in all the Colonies, and not exclusive to South. “The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South,” thus to create a permanent category of the lowly, of those who have no honor and therefore no worth as human beings. Wyatt-Brown's theory is supported by the findings of Edmund S. Morgan in The Labor Problem of Jamestown, 1607-18. The settlement was suffering from labor shortage, and even at the brink of extinction, the colonists were made to work only four to six hours a day, because industry was discouraged through the policy of labor conservation. Additionally, the Virginia Company viewed the colonization process as a military expedition. Contemporary armies consisted of nobility and their servicemen, living by plunder in the times of war, and “absorbed in slothful and parasitic personal service” during peacetime. Many settlers had skills that were still unnecessary in the wilderness of Virginia: too many blacksmiths and not enough plowmen.

So these factors contributed to the formation of society in which every person believed to have occupied one's rightful place, to which one was entitled, and wished not to “encroach” on the places of others, as it was in England, where virtually all the residents of Virginia came from at the time. African slavery was, then, a perfect solution to the labor problem and the honor problem.

However, the capitalist economic relations still played a huge role in the establishment of the Southern system. Rhys Isaac, in his seminal work The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, points out that the influence of a patriarch in Chesapeake colony always depended on how much slaves and land he owned, and on how well the said land was suited for growing and selling tobacco. Gentleman status in the South, no matter how rigid the “Indo-European” (W.-B.) honor system was, could still be bought. This was the critical connection between the Southern castes and slavery, this was what kept poor white folks in check with their superiors. Andrew Hahn, in his 1984 American Quarterly review of Southern Honor, correctly points out that most of Wyatt-Brown's evidence pertains to the upper classes, so the yeomanry and the lower classes appear “through the lenses of their betters.”

Why would poor whites support the system that subjected them to endless bowing and hat-tipping to those above them, with no end in sight? The answer is the transformative possibilities that the slave market held. Walter Johnson calls this phenomenon “men made out of slaves.” John M. Tibeats, a free white man who bought Solomon Northup in 1842, thus struggled to buy his way into the masters' class, because, as Northup notes, before he had had no respect neither of his peers, nor even of slaves. Had he succeeded in this, he would be able to develop some good standing among other free whites. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for Northup, that did not go well: after the master and the slave had a fight in which Northup had an upper hand, Tibeats prepared to kill him, but it turned out that he didn't have a right to do so: Northup (then known as Platt) was still mortgaged to another man. Tibeats' “assertion of the rights of mastery,” Johnson writes, was “constrained by his incomplete transition from nonslaveholder to slaveholder.” The more lucky new slaveholders, like Jefferson McKinney, were the ones who perpetuated this particular means of social mobility in the South: according to Johnson, McKinney chose to buy a young, “verry wel grone” woman, so she could bear children who would automatically become new slaves and the guarantors of his wealth and respectability.

The more slaves a person had, the more was he or she dependent on them. Politicians like Thomas Jefferson could not free their bondsmen and women in their lifetimes, if they wanted to maintain influence, even if they came to personally oppose slavery. For an average slaveholder in the South, slaves represented not only his fantasies about himself, but very well reflected the good (or bad) order of his business and his household. Healthy, polite, skillful slaves greeting the master's guests, catering to their every caprice, were upholding their owner's reputation. So this is how the “unitary order of masters and slaves” was constructed. Indeed, the positions of the masters in it were as rigid as their slaves', because if the slaves could be freed (or, in some cases, work to buy their freedom), the masters still would have to buy new ones, which they did. Moreover, slaves were a prime investment—expensive property that could be moved virtually anywhere. Johnson mentions that in antebellum East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, slaves made up 80 percent of the security in recorded mortgages. They were also used as collateral in credit transactions. The value of the “order” was very tangible, and additionally supported by the honor codes, which evolved from simple patriarchy to paternalism.

The cultural significance of the latter could not be understated. Alexander Saxton, in Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology documents the rise and the incredible popularity of the blackface acts in the nineteenth century. It is true that the audience of the blackface performers was primarily in the free Northern states, and consisted of free working-class whites who neither had any exposure to the Southern system nor actually wished to own black people as property. But it is impossible to deny that a) blackface was built entirely on the paternalistic image of slavery, portraying it as a benevolent institution; b) such depiction and the popularity of minstrelsy amounted to the stereotype of blacks as inferior beings. Thus, slavery in a mindset of a mid-century Northerner well may have been registered as something the Negroes deserved, and the hypothetical number of outside opponents to the institution may have diminished as the result of the public acclaim that the blackface acts enjoyed.

However, the stability of the “unitary order” was perfect at no time. Moral opposition to slavery and the hierarchical honor codes was already present as early as the eighteenth century. Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia describes the impact that the evangelical movement had on the Southern society during that period. New Light Separate Baptists, settling in parts of Virginia beginning in 1765, brought with them the egalitarian ideology, where the social organism of the colony was not represented as God's natural order, but as an abomination, a constraint on a person's liberty, which could be achieved through what the higher-ups perceived as the act of dishonoring. Isaac gives an account of a Baptist preacher being dragged off the stage and whipped by the sheriff, only to return to speaking with even greater determination, “Singing praise to God.” Poor whites and slaves alike flocked to Southern Baptists in the next decades, siphoning off parts of support for the dominant system. People in the Baptist communities referred to each other as “brothers” and “sisters,” giving a person a sense of family apart from his own one. This was greatly disapproved by the gentry authority, and many preachers were imprisoned for spreading “dissent,” that is, sentiments that might have wrought slaves, poor whites (and, occasionally, some masters) out of the “natural” order.

Rebellions, as rarely as they happened considering the aforementioned circumstances, still did happen, and they had a great cultural impact in the slaveholding circles, as they undermined the paternalistic myth. Could any Negro be trusted after Nat Turner's rebellion? Blassingame states that most of the times, slave revolts were led by quite genteel, intelligent, and well-treated slaves such as Nat Turner himself. So, practically every slave quarter harbored potential trouble. Slaves who ran away also fomented sense of anxiety in the masters: just how cunning they were, those people believed to be faithful Sambos? The fugitive slave notices that Blassingame provides sometimes seem to provoke cognitive dissonance. Some of the slaves are described as very industrious and faithful, very trusted and completely subdued to their masters: but they still ran away, and prepared themselves for this task with great meticulousness. Most of the slaves were adopting a social persona that would protect them from their masters' anger, and to support their paternalistic delusions. The slave communities were so extensive that they received the name of “The Underground Railroad,” providing shelter and help to those who managed to escape the bondage. Even if slaves were termed property, they still were human beings, and they put every effort in thwarting their possible sale, reuniting with family members through sale they could facilitate by behaving appropriately, and otherwise manipulating the system that was designed to manipulate them.

No system in the history of mankind was perfect, especially the ones that were based upon involuntary servitude. Considering the interdependency between the slave economy and the honor hierarchy in the antebellum South, one arrives at a curiously circular-like logic: this symbiosis of two systems was relatively stable and fundamentally unstable at the same time precisely because of its nature. It expired in due time, due both to growing outside resistance (Northern abolitionism and evangelical movement, which opposed slavery as much as inequality among whites, thus rejecting the honor code), economic constraints (industrialization of the United States and the finiteness of the land expansion for slaveholders' needs), and to the foundational moral fault of human bondage that was at its core.

The Moral World of "The Wire" (practice paper, September 2014)

PARTICIPATION ASSIGNMENT #2 'CRIME DRAMAS'

The Wire, S4E12: 'That's Got His Own'

Original airdate: September 3, 2006

Stepan Serdiukov

AMST 442: Television and American Culture

October 9, 2014.

Of all the shows aired on American cable and network TV in the 2000s, probably none managed to both receive substantial, ever-persistent critical acclaim and cult following, and not to win any major industry awards, as was the case with The Wire, a crime drama series created by David Simon and produced by HBO. Its gritty realism (or, rather, verisimilitude) in the portrayal of urban poverty, and unrelenting social criticism of American policing not only garnered The Wire a place in the pantheon of the greatest shows ever, but made it a fixture in at least three universities' course catalogs1.
Thematically, the show is so rich, that one doubts if the academic interest to it ever ceases: The Wire, like the novels of Dickens, to which it is often compared (and just like any significant cultural text), welcomes all sorts of scrutiny, based as much on its substance as on its style. This paper is going to deal with the moral world of The Wire—specifically, of its episode “That's Got His Own,” penultimate in the fourth season, premiered on September 3, 2006.
The episode is set in Baltimore, Maryland, the main scene for all The Wire seasons. Richard Sparks, in his 1992 treatise of television crime stories, notes that “the vast majority of both British and American series are set wholly or predominantly in the great cities.” Baltimore was the early and obvious choice for the showrunner David Simon to place his characters in, because The Wire is based on his experiences as a police beat reporter for The Baltimore Sun in the 1980s. However, it also begs to note the additional, symbolic layer here: Baltimore is known as a city where Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the detective fiction, lived and worked.
The episode's main plotline, the 'criminal' one, is concerned with Omar Little, a renowned stick-up artist, planning and executing a robbery of the drug shipment belonging to his enemies, in order to avenge their attempt to frame him earlier. Revenge is also a motivation for another crime, that a homeless drug addict Bubbles unwittingly commits, when his friend Sherrod dies after injecting the 'hotshot' of heroin that Bubbles wanted to use on another addict, who often robbed him on the streets. The 'cop' plotline takes the viewer to witness the work of BPD Detective Lester Freamon, who discovers the connection between the bodies of murdered people being found in abandoned buildings, and the local drug-dealing gang. Two of the places where the crimes take place, are public: the housing projects where Freamon keeps finding the cadavers; and the unused warehouse where Omar takes the heroin shipment by force and cunning.
Describing the common cop show tropes, Sparks mentions 'indoors' as a space of reflection and intimacy for the characters. The crimes committed in private residences on TV are, therefore, usually portrayed to be especially heinous, with thugs invading quiet homes and terrorizing the inhabitants (the author takes his examples from Miami Vice). As regards this episode of The Wire, it is interesting to see such cliché being served to us in an unusual way: Bubbles and Sherrod make a home out of a decrepit apartment. Since they have no right to be there, and both are destitute, unkempt drug addicts, the viewer is at first ambiguous about the setting: is it public or private? In just a few minutes, we are first assured that it is, indeed, private, as we see Bubbles wake up in the morning, start friendly banter with his younger protege, and, amazingly, take time to carefully make his bed of rags; and then shocked as we see death destroying the good mood of the scene, when Bubbles discovers Sherrod dead on the floor, having injected the hotshot meant for an enemy.
This, however, isn't a central crime of the episode: the honor belongs to Omar Little's stick-up operation. As mentioned above, his chief motivation is revenge. Omar is a calm, calculating black man in his late 20s, a child of the projects and a much feared adversary of Baltimore's drug dealers, whose stashes he specializes in taking. He is assisted by other people of color: his Puerto Rican boyfriend Renaldo, a black girl Kimmy, and Renaldo's Latino associates. In course of the robbery, they confront several unnamed guards of the shipment, all of them African-American.
Omar's desire for revenge does fall into the list of possible criminal motivations as given by Sparks, but the crime is not portrayed as a product of his inherently villainous nature: he treats it just like another job, another round of “the game,” as the drug trade is called on the streets of David Simon's Baltimore. There are few true villains in The Wire, and Omar isn't one of them. If anything, he is a peculiar kind of a hero: he never harms civilians while on the job, eschews killing people if they are not trying to kill him (the only shot fired during the robbery was by Kimmy). Omar is shown to be merely a child of a broken social system, where a young poor man of color has little opportunities. He lives in relative poverty, never being able to successfully cash out after his many robberies, but, at the same time, is his own man, which is rare in the world of crime shows that Sparks covers: in Sparks' sample, poor criminals are most always the minions of the rich ones. Mr. Little is never a direct adversary of the show's police officers (true for this episode as well), but he has a lot of potential for one: Omar is every bit as smart, cunning and able, as they are—thus matching Sparks' basic description of a TV criminal mastermind. He is certainly capable of having a connection with a civilian world, but the possibility of his rehabilitation is never openly implied, either.
Absent the villains, we do have a hero in this episode: Lester Freamon. The seasoned detective tries to persuade his superiors to let him open new cases on the bodies found in the projects, but they are reluctant, because it would drive the force's murder clearance rates into the ground, and possibly destroy the good statistics for the year (Freamon makes his stunning discovery in December.) Lester is forced to struggle with the authority, with the angry chain of command going as high up as the Baltimore's police commissioner and the Mayor, but he undoubtedly has the moral high ground. “Heroic insubordination” is often the case in The Wire, but not in the current episode. In any event, Freamon validates the whole BPD by being an honest and hardworking cop, even if that isn't in the current best interest of the organization.
The victims in the episode are numerous. First, the nameless rival drug dealers found dead by Freamon in the tenement buildings. Second, Sherrod—the accidental victim of Bubbles. Third—Miss Anna, the foster parent of a problem kid, Randy Wagstaff, who suffers severe burns after uknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails through her apartment windows. All the victims are black and poor (therefore, as per Sparks, “socialy proximate” to the villains), but only Miss Anna isn't a “legitimate” part of the Baltimore's underworld, so her suffering particularly resonates with the viewer, because the dealers were, after all, part of “the game,” (“culpable”) and Sherrod was an addict already set out to destroy himself (just unfortunate). Again, The Wire is never too close to sending simplistic moral messages, but the “vulnerability trope” is obviously at work here: Miss Anna is a single mother, and she is shown to offer one of the detectives breakfast when he comes by to check if she and Randy are all right.
Crime and criminals in the episode are essentially the symptoms of a social malady, hardly treatable in the current conditions, which include indifferent policing, preoccupation with crime statistics, and broke city schools. The consequences of the latter are especially visible, as the show follows three junior high black kids orbit further and further from normal life, as the school is unable to keep them in, burdened by test performance requirements and other bureaucratic matters. “Nature versus nurture” argument about criminals is presented in an interesting light, as a boy named Namond Brice struggles to leave the drug-running, but is pushed back to it by his angry mother. At one point, he confesses to the local boxing gym manager (a reformed criminal): “The way he [his hitman father serving a life sentence] is and shit... it just ain't in me.” Eventually, even the demanding environment can't make a criminal of someone not cut to be one, the scene suggests.


Sparks, Richard. Television and the drama of crime: Moral tales and the place of crime in public life. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992.

Studying Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation (practice paper, September 2014)

APPLIED PRACTICE PAPER#1

Studying Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation

“Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic”

GQ, July 2014

 Stepan Serdiukov

AMST 501: Theory and Methods

September 23, 2014

In March 2014, the United States Bureau of Land Management sent its representatives, along with the law enforcement rangers, to round up and impound the trespassing cattle on the federal land in Clark County, Nevada. Thus, the government moved to resolve its 20-year dispute with the cattle's owner, local rancher Cliven Bundy, who had been refusing to pay his grazing fees since 1993, claiming that federal powers have no authority over any of Nevada's lands.

However, the story was still far from its conclusion. On April 12, a group of Bundy's supporters, many of them heavily armed, confronted the BLM agents guarding the impounded cattle. Fearing especially fatal consequences, the Bureau director Neil Kornze ordered the agency's employees to release the cattle and leave. So, the unruly rancher emerged victorious—at least, for the time being. Bundy's supporters, in some number, remained on his land until June.

Their exploits are described in the article 'Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic,' published in GQ magazine in July 2014 —the text that is going to be the subject of the current paper. It is built around reporter's conversations with Cliven Bundy himself, the militiamen, and his own observations about the situation in the vigilante camp.

For several reasons, this article is especially well-suited for analysis applying the American Studies theoretical framework. First of all, its principal characters are members of a self-styled 'citizen militia,' yet another modern facet of a fringe paramilitary movement, that gained momentum in the early 1990s, and which, in turn, was part of a long and controversial American tradition of vigilantism. Second of all, vigilantism in the US is inextricably connected with racial and social conflicts that in no small part defined the relationship between different class and race groups in this country. Additionally, the magazine story is rich with author's personal assumptions and opinions, expressed quite openly; this gives our inquiry yet another subject, also inseparable from American tradition (of letters.)

Therefore, it appears appropriate to study this text as a cultural manifestation of public attitudes towards militia and vigilante movements and their relationship with the federal authority, and race.

From the start, the article explicitly evokes the imagery of the American War of Independence: “Did you know there was a revolutionary war fought on American soil earlier this spring? It's true! Back in April, a small band of militiamen led by a rabble-rousing Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy defeated the United States of America without firing a single shot. And so a brand-new country—sand-choked, heatstroked, and very heavily armed—was formed inside this one [emphasis added]”. The author keeps the association alive, repeatedly referring to Bundy's supporters' camp as the “Republic” throughout the text. Moreover, the camp itself was known among its inhabitants under two names: Camp Tripwire and Camp Liberty, with American flags, as the author notes, almost ubiquitous.

The men and women defending the camp, the “Liberty” from supposed imminent encroachment or attack by the government forces, unmistakably see themselves as vigilantes, protectors of freedom. Essentially, in the American history, vigilantism meant direct democracy, the collective of people standing guard of their community's laws, and, inevitably, values. However, vigilantism is mostly a local phenomenon, whereas Bundy's supporters came from all over the United States. Take “Bam Bam”, one of the men being interviewed by Baron: he claims to have traveled all the way from New Jersey. Texas, California and New Hampshire also were among the places where Bundy's supporters came from. This makes their classification quite a curious task, because the locality they claimed to protect seemed to exist only in their minds, as they projected the ideal America they held dear onto the situation with Bundy's ranch, land, and cattle. Are they vigilantes, militiamen, or both? 

One of the most important motives in historical vigilantism was race. White lynch mobs dispatched their quick and brutal “justice” to the people outside the circle of whiteness, as whiteness, as Nikhil Pal Singh puts it, has always been a prerequisite for an ideal American national subject. Racist motives behind Bundy's supporters' actions can be found throughout the text. For example, “Bam Bam,” a New Jersey militiaman, in a conversation with the author first talks about the Fourteenth Amendment, that effectively included African Americans in the circle of citizenship. He claims that the language of the amendment suggests that people are considered corporations. (The present writer fails to find that language in the amendment.) Though “Bam Bam” does not outright deny the legality of the document, he still claims that something was not quite right with it. However, in the next paragraph, he is quoted as calling Abraham Lincoln “a tyrant-ass son of a bitch,” giving quite an impression of the aforementioned denial. Note that “Bam Bam” (as most of the camp's inhabitants) does not divulge his real name. Such propensity for remaining anonymous is quite conspicuous, especially considering the racist undertones in his speech: Ku Klux Klan lynchers (exemplary vigilantes) made quite an effort to hide their faces and names.

Baron does make a connection between the racial composition of Bundy's supporters and their motives to come all the way to the Nevadan desert: “After talking to people like Marky awhile, I thought maybe I understood it—back home they were carpenters, contractors, mechanics, repairmen, at loose ends. They were white men, mostly, who felt like this country had once been theirs and now was not [emphasis added]”. Another interesting racial image is found in an exchange between the author and a vigilante dubbed “a slightly feral Seann William Scott”:

"I've been here for days," I stammered out. I said I was a member of the press.

"What outlet you with, did you say?"

"GQ magazine."

"GQ?!" Seann William Scott sneered. "We're a bunch of G.I. Joes, not Ken dolls."

The initial line-up of the G.I. Joe action figures (depicting four of the US armed forces branches) was all-white, and to this day these Hasbro toys are mostly associated with white masculinity. Some even argue that the subsequent line-ups of G.I. Joes, where African-American toys were added, still recreated the white supremacy system while attempting to convey diversity.

Another important trait of American vigilantes throughout history was, of course, the self-righteousness with which they operated. They usually appealed to popular sovereignty and the right to revolution. The latter is prominently mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, which gives the modern militia movements a cause to invoke the Framers' ideas as defence for their activity. Vigilantes frequently see themselves as fixing the troubles with the established law and order, and Cliven Bundy is not an exception. He is portrayed to be a firm believer in his cause. “Twenty years ago, Cliven Bundy says, he “fired” the Bureau of Land Management, who'd been responsible for stewarding the land and who had failed at its job, at least according to Cliven Bundy.” This precisely reflects Bundy's philosophy of government: he does not recognize the representative government's authority over the land that belongs to it, because the land actually belongs to 'the people'. A government is seen here as an employee, subject to dismissal. So when the employee violently disobeyed, Bundy confronted the government with his own army—the vigilantes from all over America.

Self-righteousness of a vigilante also sometimes implies doing the God's work, and the text presents us with more than one example of such behavior. Bundy says: “I felt like, you know, I had God on my side.” The other camp inhabitant, a man going by the name “Marky,” confesses to Baron: “As a Christian man, I feel like the Lord has his hands right over me. I am not afraid.” Some of the armed men remembered the Waco siege as a battle of people who were in the right and died for it. They felt that the religious, sectarian zeal of the Branch Davidians had something in common with their cause.

The frontier myth is also at play here. Vigilantism, as Linda Gordon notes in her book “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction,” was strongly identified with the imagined West, the open land and the 'spice of danger' promised by it. “People kept talking about dying in the republic,” Baron notes. Here is his description of the standoff that ended in BLM agents withdrawing: “The people knelt before the government's corral and paused to pray. Many had seen this exact moment in their dreams. They prayed for their own safety, but they also prayed in thanks: Finally.”

So, the Bundy standoff as depicted in the GQ article can be perceived as a threeway performance: as reenactment of the Revolutionary era, white supremacy era and the frontier period, all consistent with the ideal national subject notion, and the American vigilante culture.

References

Zach Baron. “Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic,” GQ, July 2014, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201407/cliven-bundy

Nikhil Pal Singh. "Rethinking Race and Nation." American Studies: An Anthology (2009): 9-16.

Karen J. Hall. "A soldier's body: Gi Joe, Hasbro's Great American Hero, and the symptoms of Empire." The Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2004): 34-54.