Do The Warhol–Part 4: The Manhattan Project of the Culture War

When preaching to the choir, one directs one’s lessons to those who already agree. Conversely, those who otherwise might listen and gain something useful get nothing. More on that as this inter-connected series of observations comes to an end.

Vast, determined, highly successful forces and superior technologies dominated the theaters of WWII prior to America’s entry into the conflict after Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Manhattan Project began in August of 1942, a couple of months before General George Patton invaded North Africa. Character, strategy, and tactics played as large a role in dealing with Panzer and Tiger tanks as did Patton’s Shermans, of course, because firepower alone was insufficient in itself. But the defeat of one totalitarian threat by 1945 was not apt to make much difference in taking down another in a place where school children were being trained to fight to the death for the Empire– with sharpened sticks. The Manhattan Project, through funding, research, experimentation, design, development and production, met the challenge and made the difference.

The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Andy Warhol’s 17th birthday.

“Progressive” revisionist history would have it that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were atrocities which rank with the Holocaust. An accepted general estimate of the death toll for both cities is about two hundred thousand, as compared to projected casualties for both sides of the conflict resulting from an invasion of Japan, which number, conservatively, in the millions. Do the math. Then again, a prolonged invasion with Stalin’s help costing more lives and helping establish Soviet hegemony in the region might have been nice, by progressive standards, but American victory prevented that.

Victory in the cultural theater of the war of ideas is the contemporary problem, however, and what is commonly called the “elite media” is the dominant, overwhelming force. In contrast, for example, talk radio’s audience for conservative and independent ideas forms the choir who hears the sermons and appreciates the alternative viewpoints to the left-leaning MSM. This is not to minimize talk radio’s importance, by any means, but to point out the need for developing a potential audience throughout the media, and everywhere the purveyors of “progressive pop” have the lion’s share of cultural impact. Nothing less than a “velvet revolution” brought about by combined intellectual and production efforts on the scale of a Manhattan Project can be expected to effectively change the situation as it now stands.

The potential audience for such change, which includes a lot of kids who have nothing better to do, trends toward merely exercising the right to yell “F***” in a burning theater, the fire having been set by the aforementioned elites. This audience’s attitudinal aesthetic is effortlessly absorbed, so predominant is it in their everyday experience. The thought of TARGET stores selling merchandise featuring Ernesto Guevara’s iconic mug is as cool as anything else. Thus children at the private Black Pine Circle School may delight in their identification with the proletariat and the belief that capitalism will fail by marking the watershed event of their middle school education with the symbol of the hammer and sickle– on their publicly-displayed class mosaic. We all may be predisposed, if appropriately educated, to enjoy the irony. Or not.

But minds can change, particularly if there’s something better to do than passively absorb propaganda. It can be just as much fun to oppose it, even in subtle ways.

As an artist and a capitalist, Andy Warhol had a different take on such communist icons. One needs no highly refined eye to be struck by ways in which he presents them, for the most part, as graphically superficial or devoid of power. Perhaps this speaks to his cultural heritage from “the old country”. Somewhat surprisingly, Warhol, in fact, never created any version of the “Che” portrait, though he did once authenticate a forgery done by a Factory worker– not surprisingly, for all cash involved.

The general attitudinal aesthetic, or as one might have it, the interaction between culture and viewpoint, is critical in a democratic society. It revolves to a great extent around the prevailing culture. Right now leftist cultural hegemony holds the whip-hand over political processes and “correctness” generally. The press, the schools, the intelligentsia, the liberal arts, and pop culture are particularly saturated with progressive, collectivist, elitist thought. While the USSR rose and fell, and freedom was regained in the Bloc states as mentioned in the previous correspondence, such hegemony has had more than enough time to take hold in the West.

That these wretched, obsolete ideas, elsewhere cast into the trash-heap of history, are worthy of no more than mockery and condemnation is beside the point. They’re alive, baby. Why else would people be singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” every time the ball dropped on New Year’s in Times Square for the past four years, and likely forevermore? Refer back to the link on “irony” above for a concise description of long-term processes, as envisioned by Antonio Gramsci, by which such outdated leftist influences survive.

Interestingly, while the process of saturating the West with Marxist ideologies took nearly a century, the Warhol Factory redefined the cultural landscape in a decade or less. The progressive left had to surreptitiously fill academia, the press, and the entertainment industry with their supporters over time, since ingrained American values– and the Second Amendment– precluded other, quicker options. That goal seemingly accomplished, the capitalist economic system can now be overburdened by the demands of special interests to the extent that it collapses. The nature of the State can then be modified to control the economy and create a more ideal, pacifist, utopian system on the euro-socialist model. Everyone can be “free” to lower their expectations and be happy with less, and the “world can live as one.” Especially under the global caliphate likely to come next, if Western Europe is any indicator.

Warhol’s influence on culture, in contrast, might be seen as promoting freedom of expression and personal, autonomous vision in a social context. As American history often illustrates, one person, acting with the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, can move mountains, especially with the support of other individuals. Collective, progressive groupthink, however, has currently forced the issue that the idea of human freedom is a matter of dispute between those who favor individual liberty in Jeffersonian terms and those who demand collective “power to the people.” Is there any doubt that the people in question are of the enlightened progressive left, who will be glad to dictate their demands to all? Such thinking reduces everyone to second-class citizenship. It replaces upward mobility with that of a lateral kind, in a totalitarian class system which might just as easily leave an Andrew Warhola few better options than sweeping factory floors in industrial Pittsburgh all his life.

Instead, he built his own Factory.

To recapitulate, Warhol’s was a commercial enterprise; it ignored boundaries between the fine arts and popular culture; its influence on everyday consumer culture, society, and even political resistance to totalitarian ideas was immense, shaping attitudes as well as images. It is not Warhol’s content, but vision, methods, and means of manipulating media that provide lessons for those who would have an impact on pop culture and attendant attitudes. Finally, and of critical importance, his was an American vision, based on that enemy of progressive thinking, that “cowboy” mentality of individualism, so despised by collectivists wherever they hold power, yet within the reach of all who are willing to think for themselves.

Collectivist, progressive conformity is the enemy of freedom everywhere. It is the politically correct “enemy within” democratic governments, and it is exerting force throughout American culture and society. It can ultimately gain total power– it can happen here– decades after it has been proven unequivocally rotten to the core among free peoples. Its supporters have more money than they can spend, with billionaires on their side. Power and money will bring it to pass if nothing is done.

Free and independent thinking is a common, potentially unifying factor among conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, and large numbers of artists, producers, musicians and consumers of popular culture. Many of them may not like traditional viewpoints very much, but they still cannot stand the idea of being under the collective thumb of progressives. There are more than enough such people capable of working together as critical thinkers for the cause of personal liberty, and they have more than enough reasons to do so. As in the case of Andy Warhol’s Factory, they can have the impact of a Manhattan Project on the culture wars, facilitating a swift and irrevocable change in fundamental ways of seeing and thinking which reflect –and re-assert– American exceptionalism as a standard of excellence the moribund predictability of collectivism will forever fail to approach.

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn’t be happy with.” –Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Prize Winner and 1991-92 Poet Laureate of the United States.

[youtube Isl-5L0Jf5M : Andy Warhol August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987]

The contemporary pop cultural idea of a hero is everywhere draped in progressive, underdog guise. The contrary, rebel image will be that of a new anti-hero, one who refuses to accept the collective will and all its commandments, one who is, in fact, the real underdog of the real underground.

No other ideological self-examination necessary. It’s a simple question: Do you want to be free, or not? Heed Andrew Breitbart’s warning about pop culture. Learn from Warhol as well as Reagan. Create and support what you believe in. Connect. Let those who control the system compete with the new realities brought into being. Work from the outside or the inside, but make it happen. Make it accessible to the greater audience beyond the choir-loft. Find the money, lots of it, and be smart with it. The culture war needs a Manhattan Project, and it will not be government-funded. The future must be redefined. It can be done.

It has been done before.

–SG