The Cargo Cult of Masculinity

“How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?” was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic’s democratic constitution. “
Ana Teixeira Pinto (E Flux, Male Fantasies: The Sequel)

“The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. { } To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.”
Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961)

“Buying is much more American than thinking.”
Andy Warhol (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, 1975)

I was reminded this week, by a reader, of Klaus Theweleit’s later work, and interviews. And it got me thinking about both the valuable and the deluded aspects of Theweleit. First…from a recent interview…

“Theweleit: These men are, as I call it, “not born to the end.” This is the fear-ridden principle of masculinity,
Zeit Online: We humans are all born unfinished.
Theweleit: How you then develop is different for everyone. A baby’s body that is treated kindly develops what psychoanalysis calls the libidinal occupation of the skin, of one’s own outer boundary; through touch, being held, and feeding. These experiences enable small children to free themselves from the symbiosis with the mother. The child learns to recognise itself as a self distinct from the environment and other people. They develop a sense of their own boundaries. It becomes an ego. When you are beaten, left cold, not regularly fed or otherwise rejected, this does not work. { } Many of these men with fear-filled bodies are helped by the military. They enjoyed and still enjoy its coercive structure. In Germany until 1945, the military was seen as a place of male rebirth. It helped to break out of the perceived negative association with the principle of femininity. The man who armours himself transforms the physical symbioses into hierarchies. This is the basic process of so-called fascist behaviour. Everything that was once symbiotic and rooted in relationships is transformed into a tiered hierarchical social principle. As we are now learning without the military.”
(Interview with Klaus Theweleit on Male Fantasies Today, Geert Lovnik, July 2025)

Now, the curious and disturbing thing in this interview, which is full of insight and clear analysis, is that Theweleit refers to HAMAS terror and Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. So, for all the insight, we have deeply reactionary tendencies and positions. Not a word about Israel (except to blame for HAMAS for resistance), for example. I suspect this is a very German form of blindness.

“Then, in the sixties and seventies came political anti-colonialism, feminism and the ecologists. As a result of all this, the level of poison, as I call it, has dropped significantly.
Zeit Online: But now it’s rising again.
Theweleit: Yes, now the poison level is rising again.”
Interview with Klaus Theweleit on Male Fantasies Today, Geert Lovnik July 2025

This is interesting. The nazi sensibility was not defeated (as noted by many including myself) but went into a kind of hibernation as many former Nazis dispersed around the planet. Of course many took leading jobs in Europe, for NATO, and in banking and academia in the US. But I think the idea of the fascist ideology is on the ascent is correct.

“The Nazis introduced a new way of thinking and acting into the world that would never have been thought possible before. It was too incredible. It paralysed your actions and made your brain doubt what your eyes had seen. Something similar is happening in the world.”
(Interview with Klaus Theweleit on Male Fantasies Today, Geert Lovnik, July 2025)

And then Theweleit makes an interesting observation that has implications for art and culture (most particularly theatre):

“Theweleit: You should always assume that a person does not exist alone. The number one should be cancelled. Philosophers and historians always start from the number one: The brain thinks, the subject acts. However, the individual subject does not exist; that is, a historical chimera. The subject begins between twos; then threes, fours – the constellation is expandable.”
(Interview with Klaus Theweleit on Male Fantasies Today, Geert Lovnik, July 2025)

I have said that its very hard, if not impossible, to have one character plays. There are some, Bernhard wrote one, Beckett, too, but theatre begins with the first look on stage between two characters. Otherwise its a sermon. And that is something very different. But for the most part Theweleit is problematic. What he wrote forty years ago in Male Fantasies was profound, not because of his conclusions but because the source material was so singularly remarkable. But I suspect Theweleit doesn’t fully know why he is important.

Theweleit’s later Book of Kings (1988) is unfortunately still not translated. But it sounds fascinating. He is clearly interested in fascists (Hamsun, Pound, Celine, but also Elvis Presley and Canetti, Gottfried Benn and Warhol). And the cultural connections between Hitler and Mussolini, and Nixon, with the art and culture and the 20th century. A review of it includes the following…

“In Warhol’s silkscreen print there is instead of the 45 single a Colt 45 revolver, produced in Hartford, Connecticut where the Underwood, the first serial-produced typewriter, comes from, and the first typewriting author, Mark Twain… And so a web is spun from biographical trails, medial and technical histories, politics, rock ‘n’ roll, literature – and the spiders in the web are Elvis/Andy. At this point Theweleit’s biographical process somersaults. Linear life histories mingle into the widely intertwined network of medial and cultural history. Everything is connected to everything else, the places (Hartford, Pittsburgh, Memphis) to the artists (Presley, Warhol, Twain) to the medial technologies (radio, 7″ record, typewriter, silkscreen printing), which come from the same geographical places as the artists who come out of these techniques.”
Mediamatic magazine Vol. 8#2/3 Peter Berz, Volker Heise 1 Jan 1995

And a hat tip to a reader of mine for making me aware of the interview and subsequent work. Now, as I google Theweleit I find quite a few short glosses on Male Fantasies, even one from Steve Shaviro ( who never mentions Israel either) and I get the sense nobody quite knows what to do with Theweleit. This can be both a virtue of Theweleit or a shortdcoming. Its hard to know which in this case. Shaviro is (besides avoiding the Israeli or Hamas remark) reasonably fair (Shaviro was also fair to Norman O.Brown, who is otherwise out of fashion). But Theweleit also lumps Putin in with Trump, but makes no mention of Zelensky and only in passing mentions Netanyahu. The take-away is that Theweleit is politically immature, even if his observations and analysis, at least on a psychoanalytic level, are very good. But its still odd and a bit unsettling.

“Warhol is the embodiment of the modern recording angel, an undead ghost, a party vampire, his body, zippered with scars is the striking sign of the distorted body/mind relation. What remains? A man without qualities, anonymous, sexless, a despotic perception machine, an empty spaceless disc player with a public exhibited body: The calculated public erasure of the artist as a person, “And(rog)y(n) Warhol,” anticipating Michael Jackson and pop as anti-death and interruption of life at the same time. A kind of supercapitalism characterizes, according to Theweleit, the modern artist, who is already there, where the capitalistic circulation of goods has not yet arrived, and where series are radically democratic. Everyone, whether a Roosevelt or a Liz Taylor, eats the same hot dog, drinks the same Coke, and slurps the same Campbell’s soup. { } Warhol’s “Campbell’s Tomato Soup” is not only a self-portrait, but even stands in for the nude; the female body disappears: “the can occupies exactly the place, where art historically/theoretically the WOMAN in painting […] was located. And in the can is neither a tomato nor a woman; the modern serial model is empty like Warhol’s Campbell’s cans, like the supermodel Naomi (“Norma”, p.579) Campbell, “I’m a model, you know what I mean?””
Klaus Mladek (Klaus Theweleit’s Book of Kings, Excerpts in translation. Reviews: Nideffer net)

I like what Theweleit says about Warhol, and really most everything (not a lot since not a lot is translated) I’ve read from Book of Kings. And there is a deep disturbing truth about the artists, such as Hamsun, or Pound (et al) who gravitated to fascism. It cannot be ignored — and ‘Campbell’s soup can’ as self portrait is quite correct. But in Theweleit’s animosity toward Putin he reveals himself as a product of marketing, too.

“Writing in 1936, Walter Benjamin also saw fascism as a mock revolution: the mobilization of revolutionary demands towards an epic feat of showmanship, which stages the power of the masses without granting them rights. Fascism, he noted, gives expression to the masses’ “will to power” while preserving capitalist class structures and keeping property relations intact. The outcome of this revolutionary carnival is the spectacularization of politics: the mass rallies, the histrionics, the paranoid discourse, the need to turn the lack of material resources into a drama of presence and absence charged with sexual intensity.”
Ana Teixeira Pinto (Ibid)

Now, there are a few things different today when compared to 1936. And most of those differences are cultural. But the very idea of the masses has changed, too. And that in itself is partly a question of culture.

Theweleit: “In Germany, definitely. In America, developments in feminist theory ran parallel. But Male Fantasies doesn’t really refer to feminist theory—I was mainly influenced by the French theories of the ’50s and ’60s that explored the body as the material basis of history. That body-based view overlaps with feminism in certain ways; once you start talking about bodies (male bodies and female bodies), you’re in a place of feminist concerns. But Male Fantasies is about men, not women. A fundamental purpose determining the book, and indeed my entire work, is not to write about women, because that’s what men have always done. Male history has always depended on the woman’s body, whether used idiomatically or exploitatively; women fill the gaps in the male system. They are here to serve a function. And history has been written on neither the female body nor the male body, but on a series of representations that glide above them, upward displacements that we take as real history, and that form the habitat of the history of ideology. The French thinkers who inspired me insisted on reintroducing the body into histories of representation and ideology. That meant differentiating how the woman’s body was set apart, according to breeding function, as object rather than subject of history, as victim of history, or as secret agency. This puts us on a connotative and linguistic level where certain similarities emerge to psychoanalysis, especially the work of Wilhelm Reich. The turn to writing is also always autobiographical. I experienced a history of fascism through the bodies of my parents, who had no controlling interest in Nazism, but who went along with it: the early years of their marriage coincided with the early history of fascism, its rise to power corresponded to a certain upward mobility of their own, and this murderous double history stuck in or to them, and was immediately visible. They weren’t killer figures, but they had no way or means to develop a resistance to fascism out of the limitations or inhibitions of their bodies. And this was the odd contradiction, between basically goodwilled people, in whom nothing malignant could originate, and a specific sort of inhibition, a specific kind of violence. My father was choleric, and there were blockages in his personality before which his emotions pulled up short. This was something that happened to millions. It wasn’t an intention, it was a body block.”
Interview with Klaus Theweleit ( by Laurence A. Rickels, ARTFORUM 1993)

Much of Male Fantasies, and I suspect Book of Kings, read like updated Reich. And I think its important to make note of this. A body block is pure Reich. There are eye-blocks, and pelvic-blocks, etc. And this repression, this suppression of feeling, a suppression that masks ‘reason’, is tied into the fascist sensibility. Certainly Pasolini understood this. We see it in Trump today, but also in political figures like Mark Rutte and Kaja Kallas. The mannequins of power. The stenographers of power. Its there, too, though in Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. That stiff blocked body is a hallmark of fascist aesthetics. And in the case of Kallas, neurasthenia. There is a sense of a lack of warmth to body blocked individuals, an inability to accept love as much as to give love. There is another quality associated with this kind of suppression of emotion, and that is the lack of a sense of truth or honesty. An inability to recognize either. And Theweleit, one gets the feeling, very clearly recognizes this. Theweleit reads like the love child of Wilhelm Reich and Hunter Thompson.

But the ongoing relevance of Theweleit’s writing is perhaps the most significant takeaway. Over at Charles McFarlane’s excellent blog Combat Threads is an excellent essay on ‘operator drag’ (aka special forces style codes and civilian fascination with same, including some links very useful for discussions about ICE. Style codes are hugely important and there is a direct line of ideology AND culture connecting the Freikorps and Tora Bora https://www.instagram.com/p/DWH7NYcjTdn

But this is an era of cosplay. Whiskey Pete Hegseth is the poster boy for cosplay, but its rife within the entire adminstration. Trump never wants to feel threatened. Hence amateurs like Jared Kushner and Witkoff, or Kirsti Noem (actually fired recently), or Pam Biondi or now Erika Kirk. In fact the Trump administration actually has no professionals. And Noem was replaced by another non professional with zero experience for the job in Markwayne Mullin — previously owner of a plumbing company. And a career of sorts as a mixed martial artist. But he does have the correct ‘operator’ beard.

“The Cult of the Operator” is a relatively recent term that can largely be described as the glorification of Special Operations Forces (SOF) that elevates the individuals who are part of these units (operators) as elite warriors (distinct from soldiers) whose extensive training and inherent psychological mindset make them the perfect scalpel for use on the modern battlefield. This has also evolved concurrent to a new martial identity forged in the fires of the peace dividend that embraces a warrior ethos and an obsession with lethality.1 It has mostly floated around in national security (shitposter) circles but become increasingly common and relevant due to the steady militarization of American police and federal law enforcement (who are increasingly being deployed to American cities) as well as the embrace of this idea by large swaths of the contemporary GOP, including many leading figures within the current administration. The term I like to use is “cool boys with cool toys” because the operator, with millions of dollars and thousands of hours of training poured into their career, is afforded a leeway in equipment quality and choice that most other soldiers do not have. The operator is distinguished from the “regular” infantry by the finest force multiplying doohickeys Uncle Sam’s taxpayers can buy and many come to believe that those doohickeys are the force, not the multiplier.”
Offensive Bias blog (Sam, July 2025 )

One sort of sidebar here is the use of the term ‘theatre of war’.

“In case there is any doubt in how they view their job, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said in a press conference yesterday that ICE agents in Minneapolis had “been in theater a long time,” a phrase that has its roots in Clauzawitz’s On War, which he defined as “a portion of the space over which war prevails.” This is not law enforcement; in their eyes, it is a war.”
Charles McFarlane (Combat Threads, Operators, Cosplay, and ICE, July 2026)

The term goes back further than that, of course. To Greek Tragedy, probably. To the Illiad, too. The point is that there is a natural connection between war and the performance of war. Also that there is an audience for war. And that war is that primal scene reenacted daily (constantly?) in our psyche.

“Heraclitus’s word for war, polemos, may be defined as “strife” or “struggle”; his view of nature as in a perpetual state of struggle has had a profound influence on thinkers who have helped shape the modern world. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche gave Heraclitus credit for having “raised the curtain on this greatest of all dramas.”
Daniel Tompsett (Vision, 2013)

There is some sort of connection, then, between the deep misogyny of the Freikorps, and perhaps with all military, though there is something of a deeper connection the elite cadres of violence have with the amateur who aspires to be a part of elite violence. I sometimes wonder if the rise of National Socialism was not fed by the exact same allure that today’s ICE cosplaying amateurs feed off — and the reality is that for all the steriods and self marketing, the Delta Force and Seal Team are not really physically more impressive than many guys who train at your local gym. What, increasingly, they have is access to a lot of ‘Operator’ swag. The hi tech gear that seems to so fascinate high school boys across the U.S. That all said, the current administration comes from, largely, a special operations background. Many have resigned or been fired, but the ethos at work in the U.S. government is one that sees the world in extra-legal terms.

“For those unfamiliar, the Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon that took place at the end of the 18th century where men effectively renounced their claim to being beautiful. They did away with flamboyant colors and elaborate dress6 and replaced it with solid, darker colors, and what would eventually become the suit that every male world leader or societal elite is expected to wear. The Great Male Renunciation deprived men of the means to peacock for other men. The Cult of the Operator and all of the aesthetics of violence it entails are a vehicle for men to “prove” how they are more masculine than their peers through the purchase of equipment they affiliate with elite military formations. It is a cargo cult of masculinity.”
Offensive Bias (Sam redacted : Cool Boys with Cool Toys: The Cult of the Operator and the “Crisis” of Masculinity, July 2025)

The cargo cult of masculinity is a brilliant description of Trump’s government. But this is also an aspect of the infantilism of American culture today. Children playing dress up. The title of the above essay ‘Cool Boys with Cool Toys’. There is that ubiquitous sense of unreality, too. These changes in U.S. culture began after WW2. But the real excelleration, and disconnect, began closer the mid 80s. The United States has always been at war. It has always, since its inception, fetishized war and violence. And I wrote about this recently on this blog, but really I’ve been writing about it for a decade. And if you count my plays, more like forty years. The underclass has increasingly been subjected to vicarious solutions for their anxiety and sense of ennui. Philip K. Dick certainly wrote extensively on the new American subject and its relationship to fascism.

“The militarization of American law enforcement is a long observed phenomenon but it is worth noting that this is aesthetic militarization rather than institutional militarization. Domestic law enforcement officers are civilians, many of them have less training than soldiers and far less than the special forces operators they idolize. Their institutions do not enforce rigid discipline and oversight nor do they cultivate a culture of duty over self. Yet they are showered in military equipment provided by the Department of Defense and paid for by local taxpayers. Police departments even use this as an incentive with an Oregon State Police SWAT team recruitment email presenting images of men in plate carriers aiming rifles under night vision while asking “are you jonesing to fire less lethal rounds and gas canisters?” As of very recently, American law enforcement have also seen themselves tapped to carry out the Trump administration’s illegal deportation orders. They are deployed to American cities while outfitted in the full panoply of war as if they were occupying Baghdad to round up line cooks. The appearance of these law enforcement officers as elite special forces is intentional, both because they are pretending to be soldiers, and because they believe the people who come to oppose them will see them as the unstoppable warriors depicted in movies and video games.”
Offensive Bias (Ibid)

I was a bit surprised to learn that special forces have a small industry selling their image. There are even Navy Seal courses in parenting. The Seals sell team building seminars for corporate execs, and there are books featuring Seal workouts and diet tips. Self help culture meets Line of Duty. It does point up, though, just how deeply this kitsch cosplay culture goes.

“John Foster Dulles was certainly different. The apocalyptic anti-communist saw in Mossadegh the epitome of all that he detested in the Third World: unequivocal neutralism in the cold war, tolerance of Communists, and disrespect for free enterprise, as demonstrated by the oil nationalization. (Ironically, in recent years Great Britain had nationalized several of its own basic industries, and the government was the majority owner of the AIOC.) To the likes of John Foster Dulles, the eccentric Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh was indeed a madman. And when the Secretary of State considered further that Iran was a nation exceedingly rich in the liquid gold, and that it shared a border with the Soviet Union more than 1,000 miles long, he was not unduly plagued by indecision as to whether the Iranian prime minister should finally retire from public life. “
William Blum (Killing Hope)

Blum addes a bit later “Twenty-six years later, Kermit Roosevelt took the unusual step of writing a book about how he and the CIA carried out the operation. He called his book Countercoup to press home the idea that the CIA coup was staged only to prevent a takeover of power by the Iranian Communist Party (The Tudeh) closely backed by the Soviet Union. Roosevelt was thus arguing that Mossadegh had to be removed to prevent a Communist takeover, whereas the Truman administration had felt that Mossadegh had to be kept in power to prevent one. It would be incorrect to state that Roosevelt offers little evidence to support his thesis of the Communist danger. It would be more precise to say that he offers no evidence at all. “

Theweleit’s most famous book Male Fantasies is hugely germane for indexing the deep seething misogyny of western societies, and capturing something of the climate of unconscious toxicity toward and terror of woman, and sexuality, that seemed inextricable from and a co-creator of the fascism that lurked at the corners of the West until finally taking over with National Socialism (and one can now add Zionism). From the colonial barbarism Europe inflicted on the global south to the rise of Hitler and now Zionist sadism and messianic delusions, the mechanisms of scapegoating and an attendant self loathing and narcisissm both, have arrived at the Pere Ubu administration of Trump and the collapse of European culture. When reflecting on this history it becomes even more clear how profound was the existence of the Soviet Union, and of Cuba and Maoist China. For without them now, there has been a coming to the surface of the most sadistic and irrational parts of the human mind.

The socialist/communist experiment saved humanity in the most direct sense. The forces counter to this, the fascist authoritarian sensibility, in their infancy were planting seeds in the middle of the 19th century (in Europe anyway). Strindberg wrote a letter to critic Edvard Brandes (brother of critic Georg Brandes) on the topic of Friedrich Nietzsche…

“However, the uterus of my mental [spiritual] world has received a tremendous ejaculation of the sperm from Friedrich Nietzsche, so that I feel like a bitch with a full belly. He’s the man for me! Give my regards to Georg Brandes and thank him for introducing us! (Woman-hater, of course, like all talented men!).”
August Strindberg (Letter to Edvard Brandes, 1888) (quoted in Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians)

The homoerotic tensions between Nietzsche and Strindberg, as one reads their correspondence, speaks to the contradictions of western industrial society as it approached the turn to the 20th century. And the contradictions of industrial masculinity. This is not unrelated to the queer fascist (and religious) fanaticism of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Nor to the rise of Evangelical Christianity (my previous blog post).

Leaping ahead to the mid 20th century, the post war social revolutions…

Andrew Ross lists four iconic moments from the 60s. This is important, but I will get to ‘why’ below.

“1961: In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich)—according to Bette Davis, the first “women’s picture” for over ten years, bringing together for the first time the aging, uncrowned royalty of classic Hollywood, Davis and Joan Crawford—“Baby Jane” Hudson, ex-child-star, now grotesquely made-up (at Davis’s own inspirational insistence) like a pantomime Ugly Sister, serves up steamed pet bird for lunch to her wheelchair-bound sister Blanche…{ } “Their House of Usheresque present refracts the Babylonish history of Hollywood stardom, while it creates a new horror film subgenre for the new decade.”

Second : “1964: A different Baby Jane, in a New York photographer’s studio in the year of the British Invasion—Baby Jane Holzer, in Tom Wolfe’s “Girl of the Year,” cavorting at her twenty-fourth birthday party which doubled as a publicity event for her star guests, the Rolling Stones. Back from the London “Pop” summer of 1963, sporting the Chelsea Look, and talking Cockney (“Anything beats being a Park Avenue housewife”), Holzer, for Wolfe, for Vogue, and for Andy Warhol, is the living symptom of the new, pluralistic, “classless” melting pot culture, where socialites—though not only the Social Register type—enthusiastically took up the styles and subcultural idioms of arriviste “raw-vital proles.”

We will get to Warhol more, too, below.

Third: “1969: The evening of the funeral of Judy Garland (a long time gay icon), members of the New York City Vice Squad come under fire, from beer cans, bottles, coins, and cobblestones, as they try to arrest some of the regulars at the Stonewall Inn in Christopher Street. The mood of the protesters, many of them street queens in full drag, had changed from that of reveling in the spectacle of the arrest, even posing for it, to one of anger and rage, as one of the detainees, a lesbian, struggled to resist her arrest.”

and #4: “Later in 1969: A different scene of conflict at the Altamont free festival, the dark sequel to Woodstock, and the Stones again. Jagger is up front, berobed and mascara’d, swishing, mincing, pouting, and strutting before a huge audience barely in check, while on every side of the stage are posted Hell’s Angels, confrontation dressers all—the sometime darlings of radical chic, which saw in them an aggressive critique of the counterculture’s “male impotence.” Here employed as soft police, they stare, bluntly and disdainfully, at the effeminate Jagger, some of them mocking his turns and gyres, while the off-stage violence escalates, to end soon in the death of Meredith Hunter caught on film in Gimme Shelter…”
Andrew Ross (No Respect)

I graduated high school in the summer of 69. I got a 4F deferment from military duty that summer, too. My antiwar doctor said I wet the bed, was homosexual and resistant to authority. The army just mailed me the 4F, I didn’t even have to show up. This chapter from Ross’s book is an analysis of camp. And I have returned to this several times this last year because I sense it has importance I have not fully grasped. And because Sontag didn’t quite get it right (common with her, though she deserves credit for introducing the idea and showing it had importance).

“The anxiety of that moment is ironically figured in the other great camp film of that year, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, in which a young Monroe plays the role of a talentless ingénue hotly pursuing a career in one of the vacuums created by the retirement of a great Broadway actress (played by Bette Davis), just as the traditional hierarchy of prestige between Broadway and Hollywood is being expanded to include a third, and much despised third term—television (in the words of the film’s theater critic, Addison De Witt: “That’s all television is, my dear, nothing but auditions”). As Hollywood is passing out of its lavish “bourgeois” moment, the origins of that moment are invoked in Sunset Boulevard by the anachronistic spectacle of Norma Desmond, a gaudy survivor of the pre-bourgeois age of screen gods and goddesses, whose crumbling aristocracy now serves, in the fifties, as a displaced symptom of the current crisis in prestige of the film medium.”
Andrew Ross (Ibid)

Discussing the Baby Jane Holzer moment, Ross notes how the British ‘music invasion’ was a necessary gateway drug for Americans to accept their own pop culture.

“The camp moment in this complex process, however, is the recognition of the eclipsed capacity of real British power to play the imperialist game of dominating foreign taste. That is why the British flag, for Mods and other subcultures, and Victoriana, for the Sergeant Pepper phase of the later sixties, became camp objects—precisely because of their historical association with a power that was now in decline. The Stars and Stripes, and most Americana, by contrast, could only be kitsch (gracelessly sincere), because they intend serious support for a culture that still holds real power in defining the shape of foreign tastes.”
Andrew Ross (Ibid)

Today this is no longer true. Whiskey Pete Hegseth and his stars and stripes pocket square (hankerchief in suit breast pocket) is no longer just kitsch (it is that, too, of course) but is now a camp symbol of cosplay power. In fact Hegseth will soon, I suspect, become a camp icon. But in the 60s, and on through the 70s, as Reyner Banham noted, the art industries themselves provided the ‘talent’. Warhol and Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, etc. Now Ross notes this but without realizing the working class voices were already there in Abstract Expressionism and colour field. None of the Ab Ex painters went to prestigious schools. They did, however, study fine arts unlike many of the 60s artists who came from pure trade backgrounds.

Hegseth almost certainly makes no key decisions. He leads prayer meetings and makes sound bite appearances but the military is run by behind the scenes figures (Steve Fineberg for one, who also has no military experience but is rather a corporate CEO) and Air Force general Dan Caine. And by assorted non elected advisors (Jared Kushner, and Witkoff et al) and Peter Thiel. Hegseth is camp partly because he actually has no real role to play.

But what is worth pointing out here is that Altamont was an epitaph for sixties social radicalism. The Grateful Dead actually recruited the Angels to serve as alternative policing. And it is also to be noted that the Angels were profoundly reactionary politically (often marching against Vietnam war protestors as unpatriotic ). Also, what is rarely analysed vis a vis Altamont was that the music already felt past its sell by date. Nobody was excited Carlos Santana was performing. And I remember the unshakable intuition that the Stones were in total a reactionary formation. In hindsight not enough importance is given (not just politically but in terms of culture and aesthetics) to the Red Brigades and the Baader Meinhof Group. The Red Army Faction (Baader Meinhof) was already active. The Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) was already active. One in Italy and one in Germany. The end of the 60s was footnoted by both these groups. And there has been scant artistic treatment (Fassbinder is an exception), and later there is a good film on the BA, The Baader Meinhoff Complex (2008) directed by Uli Edel. The children of the Nazi generation were serious whatever one thought about their tactics. But mostly mainstream culture wants to forget them.

The western press has never come to terms with the radicals of the 60s and 70s.

“In the post-Stonewall years, gay males emerged as one of the prime target, cachet groups that was ripe for new consumer marketing in the early seventies. The result was a thriving sexual marketplace where the advancement of sexual freedoms was often inseparable from the commodification of sex itself. The gay male became a model consumer, in the vanguard of the business of shaping and defining taste, choice, and style for mainstream markets.”
Andrew Ross (Ibid)

“Unlike the traditional intellectual, whose function is to legitimize the cultural power of ruling interests, or the organic intellectual, who promotes the interests of a rising class, the marginal, camp intellectual expresses his impotence as the dominated fraction of a ruling bloc at the same time as he distances himself from the dominated fraction of a ruling bloc at the same time as he distances himself from the conventional morality and taste of the ascendant middle class.”
Andrew Ross (Ibid)

Thee problem, really, with camp is the lack of seriousness. Everything becomes frivolity. The over appreciation of bad taste ultimately ends up in bad taste, period. Picking your ‘favorite’ episode of Dynasty or Gilligan’s Island is not subversive, and not meant to be. And here I refer you to the rise of the gay (white) male consumer demographic noted by Ross. So, the tension between the masculinity problem in post WW2 culture (and politics) and the actual brutality visited upon the former colonies during their movements for independence, and one is thrown back again to the Strindberg letters and his friendship (sic) with Nietzsche. The mythology of masculinity was in crisis by the mid 19th century.

And to Theweleit.

“In the 70s everyone drops everyone else. The ’60s are filled to the rim.The ’70s are empty. Being left over is a hard problem to solve, in 1970 as in 1930. In 1930, the evacuation of an entire world of production occurs through an external political power. In the early 70s it has more to do with another force: the force of prowling egos seeking their own decline, dissolution, transformation. (Compared to this, gravity is like the drift of a snowflake.) That Warhol ceases to be underground means in the first place that the underground itself ceases to be. { } The cynicism that everyone confirms as part of the Warholian “attitude” of vacillation and oscillation (Victor Bockris: he was “typically two-sided”) is seldom seen for just what else it is: the instrument of stasis, of equalizing the tension between the poles. Warhol’s cool, “ironic,” “indifferent,” “cynical” attitude prevents the dominance of any one pole.”
Interview with Klaus Theweleit ( by Laurence A. Rickels, ARTFORUM 1993

Benjamin said somewhere that aestheticism always leads to fascism. Theweleit decries this quote in the Rickels interview. And this is sort of Theweleit’s problem. He stops paying attention to Freud, and doesn’t quite understand Warhol in relation to camp. I think its a slight homosexual panic on Theweleit’s part, actually. Benjamin is quite right, of course. But he was being reductive. Because I would argue that Camp tends to lead to fascism, too. Fascism is a rescue mechanism of capitalism, but it is also baked into the cultural fabric (hence the different forms of fascism).

“There was a darker, and more gruesome side to this economy of passion, however, and it can be seen best embodied in the category of bad taste—Sontag’s formulation of “the ultimate Camp statement; it’s good because it’s awful”—which, in the course of two decades, has come much closer to being recognized as a semi-legitimate cultural expression, if only because it has become a thriving market in its own right. There is no question that Camp’s initial patronage of bad taste was as much an assault on the official canons of taste as Pop’s eroticization of the everyday had been. But bad taste was by no means a clean break with the logic of cultural capital, for it must also be seen from the point of view of those whom it indirectly patronized, especially those lower middle-class groups whom, historically, have had to bear the stigma of “failed” taste.”
Andrew Ross (Ibid)

Ross adds a few pages later “Barbara Ehrenreich has argued that the fifties “male revolt” against the suburban bondage of breadwinning, symbolized by the consumerist Playboy lifestyle, also delivered men from suspicions of homosexuality that had hitherto been attached to men who avoided marriage.”

And of course Playboy always added at least one ‘serious’ interview or article. And in fact there were dozens of remarkably good interviews looking back. And that speaks to erosion of literacy today, sixty years later. The Trump administration itself would be a form of camp if it weren’t so toxic and malevolent. If the real design here is chaos, intentional chaos, this makes a certain amount of sense. Trump creating a machine for insider trading and enriching his cronies. And it makes sense for fanatics like Peter Thiel, or the various Zionists who have messianic agendas. That Trump has no long term plan is, to say the least, unsettling. But too return in conclusion to the cultural evolution, I have written before about the absent idea of the ‘Father’, the interrupted Oedipal narrative and what Robert Bly called the Sibling Society — accompanied by the inextricable erosion of public education, the addiction to screens, and the loss of literacy. There seems a sort of interregnum in the mythology of masculinity. John Bayley, at the London Review of Books, writing on Elias Canetti (a favorite author of Theweleit)….

“In his study of Kafka Canetti writes that his strength was increased by the horror with which he saw the ‘mass events accompanying the outbreak of war’. The rigour, the totality of his art is a direct expression of the wholeness of that sense of horror, the ‘bond between the external hell of the world and his inner hell’. ‘He did not have for his private and interior processes that disregard which distinguishes insignificant writers from writers of imagination. A person who thinks that he is empowered to separate his inner world from the outer one has no inner world from which something might be separable.’”
John Bayley (Canetti and Power, LRB, 1981)

Bayley, a deep reactionary, still saw that Canetti found importance in Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Büchner, and interestingly in Stendahl. That even great authors like Tolstoy were of much less interest to him. For what he wanted was recognition of an inner hell.And that I feel is where we are today, in total, trying to make sense how the inner hell became also an outer hell.

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