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4. Genocidal Spectacles and the Ideology of Death
- State University of New York Press
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Representations of mass murder and the ideology on which they are based have held a place of centrality in American media culture since its inception. From D. W. Griffith’s falsified, racist version of the Civil War in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and his Fall of Babylon and persecution of the French Huguenots in Intolerance (1916), the cinema has been intimately associated with the politics of twentieth-century genocide and with the antecedents of modern mass murder in earlier epochs. Intolerance has a privileged relevance to my remarks. Griffith’s rather pacifist epic, a disingenuous apology for the racism of The Birth of a Nation, was not well received by a U.S. population that in the first decade of the century had been rather isolationist and pro-labor but that became steadily more warmongering with the impact of Woodrow Wilson ’s propaganda machine, designed to stir up hatred against the Central Powers as the United States prepared to help its friendly rivals in World War I. This “machine” was the Committee on Public Information, chaired by George Creel and including pioneering public relations whiz kid Edward Bernays (Chomsky 1997). The notorious Creel Committee, and the Davis Committee that in a similar way softened the public for World War II, made the modern warfare state palatable by tweaking public sensibilities in the direction of intervention, heroism, and payback. Griffith’s film obliquely references operations of the early public relations industry and its services to state power. In the scenes of strikebreaking C H A P T E R F O U R Genocidal Spectacles and the Ideology of Death CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT 65 and mass murder by the National Guard at the Jenkins Mill, Griffith embodies the populist furor over the notorious Ludlow Massacre. In 1914, John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired goons and guardsmen to mow down striking workers no longer able to tolerate the barbaric conditions at his mining and chemical interests in Ludlow, Colorado. Rockefeller soon realized that in the age of the emerging electronic media, he had committed a major gaffe, and took the advice of Ivy L. Lee, another founding father of modern public relations, who counseled him to dispense with his robber baron ways and take part in a series of photo ops that would recast him as a friend of the common man. There are antecedents to that moment of public relations triumph. The death of General George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry brigade at the Little Big Horn River in 1876 (“Custer’s Last Stand”) became a logo for the Anheuser Busch beer company (Slotkin 1985). Representations of the glorious martyrdom of the outnumbered Custer, butchered by the “devious, bloodthirsty Sioux,” became omnipresent in popular culture and an important diversion from the financial panic of the 1870s, not to mention the fraudulent 1876 election, a moment with particular application to our present times. Complementing the death of Custer, and eventually competing for space in popular culture, was the assassination of frontier marshal James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok in Deadwood, South Dakota (Rosa 1964). Hickok, a psychopath who once shot his own deputy in a manic fit following a gunfight, would become firmly ensconced in the twentieth-century mass media and even have a television western of his own on Saturday mornings to entertain and indoctrinate the children of the Cold War. Hickok had once been a U.S. Army scout who participated in the Indian Removal policies initiated by Andrew Jackson and continued with incremental ferocity throughout the 1800s. One did not find in the accounts of the deaths of Hickok or Custer mention of the sustained genocide of Native Americans that made the white Western expansionism in the United States—and their dramatic involvement—possible: no mention of the Washita River, where in 1869 Custer and his regiment murdered men, women, and children of a wintering Cheyenne village in a nearrepeat of the notorious Sand Creek Massacre. An enormous—and hardly surprising—disjunction continues between official violence, its valorization in the propaganda system of the state and private sector, and the portrayal of violence by artists within and on the margins of the commercial entertainment industry. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, members of the George W. Bush brain trust, including chief of staff Karl Rove, met with such Hollywood power brokers as Jack Valenti to decide what television and movie fare would be suitable for the public sensibility during the “war on...