Richard 37th: A Study of Tyranny
Story by Fax Bahr and Phil Ethington
For what shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?
--Mark 8:36
Holding aloft the severed head of the Duke of Somerset, Richard, Duke of Gloucester--who would later become Richard III by seizing the English crown by guile and assassination--addresses that lifeless head, taunting: "Speak thou for me and tell them what I did." (Henry IV, 1.1.16, 3) In Shakespeare's gruesome script, the speechless deed is proof. Richard Nixon left behind a mountain of deeds as he plotted, strategized, campaigned his way to occupy the highest throne on Earth. Like Richard III, Richard Milhaus Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, outraged the Constitution with the felonious abuse of power. Both were overthrown. Both were tyrants.
Shakespeare co-founded, with Cervantes, a critical political art for the modern era, capable of reaching beyond the elite to a literate middle class. Both were regime loyalists and critical satirists at the same time, tunneling into the absolutist states of their day a subversive package of concepts and vocabularies that have powered critical publics ever since. Shakespeare addressed his Richard III to an Early Modern Elizabethan society with a widening public sphere. That Anglophone public sphere would expand by orders of magnitude in the 18th 19th and again in the 20th centuries. Absent from medieval England were the vast, mass-mediated publics that Nixon learned to master. Hollywood provided the mass media and the publics, and while Hollywood drew on Shakespeare to be sure, its true lineage descends from Miguel de Cervantes. The kaleidoscopic illusions of mass culture, mixing reality and fantasy--producing magical realities of terrible power--was epitomized by the other world-historic Angeleno, Ronald Reagan.
The essays titled Richard 37th, Acts I-IV, narrate the growth of a tyranny that sprang directly from the centuries-old political culture of Southern California, and from the center of that region, Los Angeles. Richard M. Nixon embodied and historically culminated the region's most destructive features: Militarism, a military-industrial economy, racial ideologies, authoritarian populism, censorship, propaganda, espionage, criminal practices at every scale.
Excursus: in exponendis nixon
Holding aloft the severed head of the Duke of Somerset, Richard, Duke of Gloucester--who would later become Richard III by seizing the English crown by guile and assassination--addresses that lifeless head, taunting: "Speak thou for me and tell them what I did." (Henry IV, 1.1.16, 3) In Shakespeare's gruesome script, the speechless deed is proof. Richard Nixon left behind a mountain of deeds as he plotted, strategized, campaigned his way to occupy the highest throne on Earth. Like Richard III, Richard Milhaus Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, outraged the Constitution with the felonious abuse of power. Both were overthrown. Both were tyrants.
Shakespeare co-founded, with Cervantes, a critical political art for the modern era, capable of reaching beyond the elite to a literate middle class. Both were regime loyalists and critical satirists at the same time, tunneling into the absolutist states of their day a subversive package of concepts and vocabularies that have powered critical publics ever since. Shakespeare addressed his Richard III to an Early Modern Elizabethan society with a widening public sphere. That Anglophone public sphere would expand by orders of magnitude in the 18th 19th and again in the 20th centuries. Absent from medieval England were the vast, mass-mediated publics that Nixon learned to master. Hollywood provided the mass media and the publics, and while Hollywood drew on Shakespeare to be sure, its true lineage descends from Miguel de Cervantes. The kaleidoscopic illusions of mass culture, mixing reality and fantasy--producing magical realities of terrible power--was epitomized by the other world-historic Angeleno, Ronald Reagan.
The essays titled Richard 37th, Acts I-IV, narrate the growth of a tyranny that sprang directly from the centuries-old political culture of Southern California, and from the center of that region, Los Angeles. Richard M. Nixon embodied and historically culminated the region's most destructive features: Militarism, a military-industrial economy, racial ideologies, authoritarian populism, censorship, propaganda, espionage, criminal practices at every scale.
Excursus: in exponendis nixon
This page has paths:
- Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from the Clovis Conquest to the Nixon Tyranny Phil Ethington
- Networks Phil Ethington
