Journal articles on the topic 'Fort Frederica National Monument'

This section contains a summary of Research Activities within the National Park Service areas cooperating with the U.W.-N.P.S. Research Center in 1985, including Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Custer Battlefield National Monument, Devils Tower National Monument, Dinosaur National Monument, Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Glacier National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Grand Teton National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Wine Cave National Park, Yellowstone National Park and Zion National Park.

This section contains a summary of research activities within the National Park Service areas cooperating with the U.W.-N.P.S. Research Center in 1986, including Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Custer Battlefield National Monument, Dinosaur National Monument, Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Glacier National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Grand Teton National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Yellowstone National Park and Zion National Park.

This section contains a summary of research activities within the National Park Service areas cooperating with the U.W.-N.P.S. Research Center, 1987 including Badlands National Park, Big Hole National Battlefield, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Bryce Canyon National Park, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Natural Bridges National Monument, Capitol Reef National Park, Custer Battlefield National Monument, Dinosaur National Park, Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Glacier National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Grand Teton National Park, Grant-Kohns Ranch National Historic Site, Jewel Cave National Monument, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Yellowstone National Park and Zion National Park.

This section contains a summary of research activities within the National Park Service areas cooperating with the U.S.-N.P.S Research Center, 1987, including Big Hole National Battlefield, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Bryce Canyon National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Custer Battlefield National Monument, Dinosaur National Park, Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Glacier National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Grand Teton National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Yellowstone National Park and Zion National Park.

This paper describes the use of terrestrial laser scanning for the full three-dimensional (3D) recording of historical monument, known as the Bastion Middleburg. The monument is located in Melaka, Malaysia, and was built by the Dutch in 1660. This monument serves as a major hub for the community when conducting commercial activities in estuaries Malacca and the Dutch build this monument as a control tower or fortress. The monument is located on the banks of the Malacca River was built between Stadhuys or better known as the Red House and Mill Quayside. The breakthrough fort on 25 November 2006 was a result of the National Heritage Department through in-depth research on the old map. The recording process begins with the placement of measuring targets at strategic locations around the monument. Spherical target was used in the point cloud data registration. The scanning process is carried out using a laser scanning system known as a terrestrial scanner Leica C10. This monument was scanned at seven scanning stations located surrounding the monument with medium scanning resolution mode. Images of the monument have also been captured using a digital camera that is setup in the scanner. For the purposes of proper registration process, the entire spherical target was scanned separately using a high scanning resolution mode. The point cloud data was pre-processed using Leica Cyclone software. The pre-processing process starting with the registration of seven scan data set through overlapping spherical targets. The post-process involved in the generation of coloured point cloud model of the monument using third-party software. The orthophoto of the monument was also produced. This research shows that the method of laser scanning provides an excellent solution for recording historical monuments with true scale of and texture.

This paper describes the use of terrestrial laser scanning for the full three-dimensional (3D) recording of historical monument, known as the Bastion Middleburg. The monument is located in Melaka, Malaysia, and was built by the Dutch in 1660. This monument serves as a major hub for the community when conducting commercial activities in estuaries Malacca and the Dutch build this monument as a control tower or fortress. The monument is located on the banks of the Malacca River was built between Stadhuys or better known as the Red House and Mill Quayside. The breakthrough fort on 25 November 2006 was a result of the National Heritage Department through in-depth research on the old map. The recording process begins with the placement of measuring targets at strategic locations around the monument. Spherical target was used in the point cloud data registration. The scanning process is carried out using a laser scanning system known as a terrestrial scanner Leica C10. This monument was scanned at seven scanning stations located surrounding the monument with medium scanning resolution mode. Images of the monument have also been captured using a digital camera that is setup in the scanner. For the purposes of proper registration process, the entire spherical target was scanned separately using a high scanning resolution mode. The point cloud data was pre-processed using Leica Cyclone software. The pre-processing process starting with the registration of seven scan data set through overlapping spherical targets. The post-process involved in the generation of coloured point cloud model of the monument using third-party software. The orthophoto of the monument was also produced. This research shows that the method of laser scanning provides an excellent solution for recording historical monuments with true scale of and texture.

AbstractWe examine the trajectories of four historical markers displaced during an enhanced Fujita scale 2 (EF2) tornado at the Fort Pulaski National Monument located on Cockspur Island, east of Savannah in southeast Georgia. The careful work of National Park Service employees in cataloguing the origin and landing points of the debris allows for an unusually accurate analysis of tornado debris trajectories for heavy objects. These markers, weighing around 68 kg (150 lb) each, traveled intact for distances of up to 220 m (750 ft). One of the historical markers was fractured into at least three pieces, the larger of which traveled 300 m (1,000 ft). Understanding the travel for these relatively heavy items is important, as they are similar in weight to household appliances that could commonly be part of a tornado debris field.

Fort Stanwix National Monument, located in Rome, NY, is a historic park with a complex use history dating back to the early Colonial period and through the urban expansion and recent economic revitalization of the City of Rome. The goal of this study was to conduct a GPR investigation over an area approximately 1 acre in size to identify buried historic features (particularly buildings) so park management can preserve these resources and develop appropriate educational programming and management plans. The GPR recorded reflection events consistent with our expectations of historic structures. Differences in size, shape, orientation, and depth suggest that these responses likely date to different time periods in the site’s history. The GPR recorded other reflection anomalies that are difficult to interpret without any additional information, which suggests that pairing high-density geophysical data with limited excavations is critical to elaborate a complex site’s intricate history.

Museums, just like formal institutions of learning always have understood that conserving collections for study and exhibition can be an important part of the educational process. Since 1957, Ghana has established several museums under the Museums and Monument Board. These museums just like others are required to play a great deal of role in the social, educational, economic development of a nation. However, it is distressing to note that with the highly endowed museum assets of Ghana, such as the Cape Coast Castle Museum, Ghana National Museum, Fort Appolonia Museum of Nzema History and Culture, the Elmina Castle Museum, Ho Museum, Bolga Museum, Wa Museum, The Head of State Museum and Museum of Science and Technology both in Accra, there has been little contributions to Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product. Significantly, visitor experience and satisfaction is very low. In this view, this study sought to investigate educational activities of Ghana Museum and Monument Board (GMMB) and inquire into their educational activities. Employing qualitative approaches, the study used a triangulation of observations, interview and focus group discussion to assemble data from these museums. In conclusion, the museums provide some sort of education but there is no formalized educational framework serving as a guide. They mainly employ monotonous experience of guided and self-guided gallery tours, and occasionally, the museum curators and educators organize a oneoff programme such as an outreach to schools and special exhibitions as well as seminars. Recommendations to strengthening museum education in Ghana are addressed Citation: Kwasi Amoako – Ohene, Nana Ama Pokua Arthur, and Samuel Nortey.Museums: An institution for knowledge acquisition – A spotlight on the museum education in Ghana, 2020 5 (2): 10－23. Received: March 3, 2020 Accepted: June 30, 2020

AbstractTwo things long stood in the way of the erection of statues in public in the Northern Netherlands, on the one hand the lack of a strong central government and on the other the wrongly interpreted - Calvinist interdict on them (Note 1). The first statue of this kind, that of Erasmus in Rotterdam by De Keyser (1622), was attacked by strict Calvinists, but noted throughout Europe as an early paradigm (Note 3). Not until the 19th century did the Netherlands join in the nationalistic 'statue craze', which was just breaking out then, with two monuments to the supposed Dutch inventor of printing, Laurens Janszoon Coster. These statues of a private citizen had a predecessor in the 18th century, while a statue had already been demanded in the 17th-century eulogies of Coster. Cities had long honoured their famous inventors as important contributors to civilization and praise of the inventor was also a fundampental ingredient of the history of learning (e.g. in Pliny). In the Renaissance scientific inventions acquired a special emphasis, modern inventors being held up as evidence that the model of Antiquity could be not only equalled, but also surpassed, while both Christian civilization and the northern countries could also gain credit here (cf. Johannes Stradanus, Figs. 2, 3, Note 9, and Francis Bacon, Note 10). The significance of the invention of printing for Christianity was soon recognized, so that it was lauded above other inventions as 'divine', an attitude that was certainly also strengthened by its decisive role in the Reformation. In the Netherlands in particular, where religious and political developments were so closely interwoven, printing was regarded as an important aid to both (Notes 14, 15), while the young Dutch Republic, in which printing played such an important part, could claim the honour of counting the inventor of this important art among its citizens. This 'pious fraud' (Hellinga) is fundamental to the discussion of the history of the statues. The Coster tradition can only be traced back to about a century after the supposed invention, acquiring its definitive form at the end of the 16th century in Hadrianus Junius' Batavia Illustrata of 1598. The further enlargement on the merits of Coster also necessitated a portrait of him which, in de fault of an authentic one, had to be fabricated for the purpose, the features of the statue of Erasmus being taken over for a full-length portrait (Fig. 5), which served as a 'graphic monument'. A fictitious bust of Coster was also cited in the 17th century (Fig. 7) and this, like the early sculptural marks of honour to him (Fig. 16), belongs to the iconography of printing, the practitioners of the craft evoking their inventor. Such representations - a more or less life-size statue of Coster is still to be seen on the house of the Haarlem printer Enschedé - were not yet very public in character. The statue of Coster projected from the end of the 17th century for the garden of the Hortus Medicus in Haarlem did acquire greater publicity, however. This humanist garden of a bourgeois learned society (Note 28), reflected not only nature, but also the world of learning, as a microcosm of the arts, with sixteen busts of connoisseurs and scholars under the leadership of a full-length statue of Coster, since it was he who by his art had made the dissemination of learning possible, although he owed his place here largely to his Haarlem origins, of course. The designs made by Romeyn de Hooghe for this statue (Note 29) were only realized in 1722 in a statue by Gerrit van Heerstal, which tried to unite historical and classical features (Figs. 8-13). In the years thereafter, up to the tercentenary of the invention, the poems, medals and a weighty commemorative publication (Fig. 14, Note 35) celebrating the Haarlem inventor of printing all referred to this statue in his birthplace. Meanwhile Germany too had honoured her inventors of printing - Fust in addition to Gutenberg, initially - in 1640 and 1710 by centenary festivities often of a Protestant cast. Privileges relating to public statues may have been one of the reasons why no monuments were erected on these occasions. These privileges were, however, annulled by the French Revolution, just as the Enlightenment and political renewal furthered the cult of honouring leading civic 'geniuses'. Two Gutenberg cities under French rule took pride of pace here, but only in 1840 did Strasbourg acquire a statue of Gutenberg by David d'Angers, which illustrated his role as the enlightener of all mankind (Figs. 15-18, Note 39). In Mainz a private initiative of 1794 came to nothing (Note 40), as did a Napoleonic rebuilding plan centred on a Gutenberg Square with a statue. Not until 1829 was a semi-public statue by Joseph Stok set up there (Note 41), while in 1837 the Gutenberg monument designed by Bartel Thorwaldsen was unveiled with great ceremony (Fig. 19). The two last-mentioned statues in Mainz, like the many others erected after 1814, were the products of the nationalistic pride in the country's past history that flared up after the defeat of Napoleon. This pride in the past generally took on a nostalgic cast and served to compensate for the failure of current political ambitions: The unity of Germany long a dream, while the hoped-for great changes in the Kingdom of the Netherlands were dealt a bitter blow by the breakaway of the 'southern provinces' in 1831 (Note 44). This last event marked the start for the Northern Netherlands of a long-lasting rivalry with their Belgian neighbours, which was pursued by means of monumental art, from the statue of Rembrandt (1852) as an answer to that of Rubens (1840) to the Rijksmuseum (1885). The great importance attached to Coster in the 19th century was already manifested in 1801 by the removal of the statue in Haarlem from the Hortus Medicus to the marketplace (Note 45). National pride is abundantly evident in the prizewinning treatise published in 1816 by Jacobus Koning, who is a weighty investigation confirmed Coster's right to the invention and with it that of the Netherlands to a leading place among the civilized nations. The quatercentenary, fixed surprisingly early, in 1823, comprised every imaginable type of public entertainment and demonstration of scholarship. It is, however, striking that these expressions of national pride were still balanced by references to the elevating effect of the invention (Note 56). The most lasting mark of honour of the celebration of 1823, the abstract monument by the Haarlem sculptor D. Douglas, also looked back to the sensibilities of the 18th century in its placing on the spot where the invention had come into being in the Haarlem Wood (Fig. 23, Note 59). After this Haarlem monument of 1823 had been adduced in the discussions about the statue in Mainz before 1829, Thorwaldsen's statue, which attracted great international attention, became a greater source of annoyance to the Dutch adversaries of Gutenberg after 1829 than the statue to the Belgian inventor Dirck Martens in Aalst (Note 63) or the projected monument to William Caxton in England. Jan Jacob Frederik. Noordziek summed up this dissatisfaction in his call in 1847 to 'uphold the honour of the fatherland', in which he pleaded for a monument that would surpass the Gutenberg statue and thus serve as an argument that would establish the Dutch claim for good (Note 64). The erection of this statue was further expressly intended to be an exclusively national affair: the citizens of the Netherlands must raise the money and only Dutch artists be charged with the execution. The general discussion about the statues appears to have been less virulent than was usually the case in the preliminaries to other monuments (Note 66), Coster's merits evidently being little contested within the country itself. There were two notable critical voices, however (see Appendix). Professor M. Siegenbeek rang the changes on an old Calvinist argument in refusing a seat on the preparatory committee: in addition to the fact that there were certainly more people who deserved statues, he pointed out that the great expense involved merely evinced ostentation and that the money would be better spent on social ends. The Neo-Classicist Humbert de Superville, on the other hand, did express doubts as to Coster's right to the title, repeating aesthetic arguments which had been adduced before: statues ought, in his view, to be made in the form of durable stone herms, but he thought there was as little chance of that in this 'age of modish lay-figures' in the bronze of melted-down coins, as that the statue would be made by a Dutchman (Note 67). A typical Romantic historical controversy threw the organizers into turmoil, namely the authenticity of the representations of Coster. In particular Westreenen van Tielland unmasked the idealizing and forged portraits, arguing against the erection of a historicizing representational statue. But the defenders of Coster's honour opted for the usual historical realism (Note 68). The tenor of these polemics is found again in the conflict over the 'historical or allegorical' nature of the composition, which can be seen in the designs. Louis Royer, to whom the commission was given in 1848, wanted to show Coster walking with a winged letter A in his hand, as if on his way to show people his discovery, which was soon to wing its way round the world (cf. Fig. 22). However, this allegorical element disappeared completely in the final version, in which the choice fell on a realistic portrait, albeit Coster was still shown walking like a classical predecessor, Archimedes, who could not keep his discovery to himself (Fig. 23, Note 69). The architect H. M. Tetar van Elven was commissioned to make a base in the style of 'the last era of the Middle Ages'. The inscriptions also presented problems, but were finally agreed on in September 1855. The ceremonies, which after all manner of altercation between Royer and the main committee (Note 70) and various financial problems, were finally able to be staged from 15 to 17 July) 1856, included, in addition to the actual unveiling of the statue on the marketplace ( Van Heerstal's statue being returned to the garden again) , pageants, meetings, an exhibition and all sorts of popular entertainments. Everything was on a grander and more extensive scale than 33 years before and little remained of the motif of enlightenment through printing which had been so important then. Nalionalistic merry-making now predominated, along with expressions of devotion to the House of Orange. Less emphasis was also given to the 'darkness' of the Middle Ages, which were now beginning to be valued as part of the nation's history. The most monumental homage to this monument was a 360-page account of the events by the indefatigable Noordziek. His dream of the recognition of Coster and the nation as a whole seemed to have become a reality. But it was not to be so for long. Only fifteen years after the unveiling A. van de Linde unmasked the' 'Haarlem Coster legend' and called for the demolition of the statue, again in the interests of the nation (Note 81).

Bird/Long Island is a dredge-spoil island located between the north and south channels near the inlet of the Savannah River at the border of Georgia and South Carolina. The island is in a tidally dominant environment and contains cultural and natural resources, including remnants of a Civil War era artillery battery. As a wetland mitigation bank, it is particularly important to the state of Georgia. However, these resources are under threat from documented and ongoing sea level rise, shoreline change (i.e., erosion and accretion) from natural and anthropogenic causes, and land subsidence. In addition to substantial tidal and freshwater flows, the island is subject to locally-generated wind waves primarily from northeast winds, as well as wake from the large container ships transiting to and from the Port of Savannah. A previous study examined the effects of wind and vessel-generated waves on shoreline retreat for the Fort Pulaski National Monument on nearby Cockspur Island (Houser, 2010). The study concluded that while the vessel-generated waves account for nearly 25% of the energy, the wind waves during storm events with increased water levels accounted for the majority of the marsh retreat. Although the proximity of this previous study site to Bird/Long Island is relevant, the different orientations of the islands and the narrowing of the channel create a different hydrodynamic environment. The present work uses field data to characterize the hydrodynamic processes affecting Bird/Long Island, which will improve modeling of its shoreline change.

The film opens in an unidentified wax museum. The camera pans from right to left, zooming in on key Black historical figures who have been memorialized in wax. W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Duke Ellington stand out. The final wax figure, a Black man, sits with an empty card box in his right hand and a lit cigarette in his left. The film’s narrator appears: a slim, afroed Black man. He sits to the right of the figure. The only living person in a room full of bodies, he reaches over to grab the cigarette. To his inanimate companion he nonchalantly says “Oh. Thank you very much. Needed that” and ashes the cigarette.The afroed, cigarette-ashing narrator is poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron. The film is Black Wax (1982), directed by Robert Mugge. Black Wax is equal parts concert film, social documentary, and political statement by the poet. Set in Washington, D.C. and released in the midst of singer Stevie Wonder’s long campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, Scott-Heron’s film feels, in part, like an extension of Wonder’s wider effort. The year prior, Wonder held a massive rally in the city to demonstrate national support for the creation of the holiday. Reportedly, over 100,000 people attended. Wonder, building on mounting support of the proposed holiday made his song in honor of MLK Jr.—“Happy Birthday”—an integral part of his upcoming tour with Bob Marley. When Marley fell ill, Scott-Heron stepped in to lend his talents to Wonder’s cause. He would then participate in the Washington, D.C. rally that featured speeches from Diana Ross and Jesse Jackson (Cuepoint).Between live performances of various songs from his catalogue, Scott-Heron stages walking interludes wherein his wiry frame ambles through the city. Most are sonically accompanied by verses from his song “Washington, D.C.” He also folds in excerpts from his poems, personal reflections, and critiques of President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Scott-Heron ambulates a historically sedimented reality; namely that Washington, D.C. is a segregated city and that America, more broadly, is a divided nation. Against the backdrop of national monuments, his stroll stages critiques of the country’s racist past. In Black Wax, song becomes walk becomes interlude becomes critique.Throughout the 1970s, Scott-Heron used his politically conscious poetry and music to mount strident critiques of social relations. Songs like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, “Winter in America”, and “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” reflect the artist’s larger concern with the stories Americans tell ourselves about who we are. This carried over into the 1980s. In his 1981 song “B-Movie”, Scott-Heron examines the ascent of Ronald Reagan, from actor to president. For the poet, the distinction is false, since Reagan “acted” his way into office. As an “actor in chief” Reagan represent a politically conservative regime that began before his entry into the White House. Reagan’s conservative politics were present when he was Governor of California and clashing with the Black Panther Party. Scott-Heron seized upon this history in Black Wax, tracing it all the way to the nation’s capital.A tour is “a journey for business, pleasure, or education often involving a series of stops and ending at the starting point” (“Tour”). Tours can offer closed-loop narratives that creates for participants a “safe” distance from the historical conditions which makes the location they are visiting possible. Scott-Heron undermines the certainly of that formulation with this wandering. In song and stride, he fashions himself a tour guide. This is not in the sense of taking the viewer into the “hood” to evidence urban decay. Rather, the poet’s critical amble undermines a national memory project that removes race from histories of the nation’s capital.Scott-Heron, self-styled Bluesologist, traveler, wanders through the world with a marrow-deep knowledge about the historical dynamics animating Black life. Walking richly informs how he relates to space. For Michel de Certeau, “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered [...] it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […] a spatial acting-out of the place […] and it implies relations among differentiated positions” (97-98). For Scott-Heron, the “relations among differentiated positions” is informed by his identity as a Black American. His relationship to race imbues him with what Black geographer Katherine McKittrick calls a “black sense of place.” According to McKittrick,a black sense of place can be understood as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter […][it] is not a steady, focused, and homogenous way of seeing and being in place, but rather a set of changing and differentiated perspectives that are illustrative of, and therefore remark upon, legacies of normalized racial violence that calcify, but do not guarantee, the denigration of black geographies and their inhabitants. (949-950)Scott-Heron elaborates on McKittrick’s concept through a series of walking interludes wherein he refuses a national narrative of harmonious racial progress. He dismisses an American fantasy of race, and it is not new. In “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” writer Ralph Ellison dissects the ways that Americans have historically tried to “get shut” of Black people, all while actively thriving on Black America’s cultural contributions. Scott-Heron’s black sense of place is articulated through a series of ambulant interventions that (subtly) acknowledge national violences while highlighting the often unspoken presence of Black people thriving in the nation’s capital.Visually, the poet sequesters national monuments to the background. Reducing their scale and stripping them of their dwarfing capacity while also actively not naming them. He miniaturizes them. This allows him to centre his critique of national history and politics. For Scott-Heron, the Capital Building and the White House are not sites to be revered. They are symbols of an ongoing betrayal perpetrated by the Reagan administration.The scenes I examine here are not representative. That isn’t my project. I am much more interested in the film as a wandering text, one that pushes at tensions in order to untether the viewer from a constricting narrative about who they might be. According to Sarah Jane Cervenak, “wandering aligns with the free at precisely those moments when it bends away from forces that attempt to translate or read” (15). In this regard, I offer this reading as a suggestion. It does not work towards a particular end other than opening the process(es) through which we make meaning of Scott-Heron’s filmic performance. In effect, don’t worry about where you are doing. Just be in the scene. Invite yourself to view the film and elaborate on descriptions offered here. Wander with him. Wander with me.———In his first walking interlude, the poet strolls along the Potomac River with a boombox hoisted upon his left shoulder. He plays a tape of his song “Washington, D.C.”, and as the opening instrumental creeps into audibility he offers his own introductory monologue:yeah, I forget what Washington did on the Potomac. This is the Potomac. Black folks would sometimes refer to that as the Po-to-mac [...] This here is the Potomac. Saw a duck floating out there a little while ago. Yeah, somebody said now that Reagan is in charge we’re all ducks. Dead ducks. You dig it?Walking along the Potomac, his slow gait is the focus. He stares directly at the camera and speaks to the viewer, to us. His (willful) forgetting of what George Washington “did on the Potomac” suggests that major figures in American history do not hold equal significance for all Americans. In fact, for Scott-Heron, the viewer/we might also do well to forget. His monologue smoothly transitions into the first verse of “Washington, D.C.”:Symbols of democracy, are pinned against the coastOuthouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moatCitizens of poverty are barely out of sightOverlords escape near evening, the brother’s on at nightMorning comes and brings the tourists, straining rubber necksPerhaps a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreckIt’s a mass of irony for all the world to seeIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C. It’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.(mmmm-hmmm)He feigns no allegiance to Washington, D.C. or the city’s touristic artifice. As the lyrics indicate, poverty stricken Americans’ proximity to physical symbols of national wealth belie the idea that democracy is successful. For him, poverty is as symbolic as monuments. Yet Scott-Heron does not visually exploit Americans living in poverty. This isn’t that kind of tour. Instead, he casts his gaze on the “symbol[s] of democracy” that celebrate the “outhouse of bureaucracy” that is Washington, D.C.As the poet continues his stroll along the Potomac, the Jefferson Memorial appears in the background. He has no interest in it. He does not name it, nor does he gesture to it in any way. Instead, he focuses his attention on the camera, the viewer, us. While the camera lags slightly behind him, rather than turn his attention to the river that he walks along, he looks over his right shoulder to re-establish eye contact with the camera. His indifference is reinforced by the nonchalant stride that never breaks. The Jefferson Memorial nor the Potomac River are objects to marvel at. They hold no amount of significance that would require the poet or viewer/us to stop and ponder them or their alleged importance. With eyes and feet, he keeps them where he wants them ... in the background.———In another interlude Scott-Heron, still holding the boombox atop his shoulder, appears in the courtyard area of an apartment complex. The repetition of his outfit, boombox location, and music give continuity to the scene by the Potomac and the unidentified neighborhood. His outfit is the same one he wears when walking by the Potomac and the boombox remains on his shoulder. Reciting the next verse of “Washington, D.C.”, it seems like he’s walking through a tableau.May not have the glitter or the glamour of L.A.It may not have the history or intrigue of PompeiiBut when it comes to making music, and sure enough making newsOr people who just don’t make sense, and people making doSeems a massive contradiction, pulling different waysBetween the folks who come and go, and one’s who’ve got to stayIt’s a mass of irony for all the world to seeIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington, D.C. He strolls along the sidewalk, the camera zooming in on his face. Over his right shoulder two Black kids pose on their bikes as men stand around them. The camera rotates clockwise, giving a slight panoramic view of the apartment building in the background. Residents crowd the doorway, a combination of what appears to be overlapping greetings and farewells. The ambiguous actions of the people in the background smoothly contrasts with the poet’s lean frame while his focus on the camera/viewer enlarges his presence.The scene also includes various people sitting on park benches. We do not know if they are residents or visitors. In many ways, the distinction does not matter. What we see is comfort in the faces and bodies of the Black people immediately behind Scott-Heron. On one bench we see two people. The first is a Black man who hoists his right leg up, resting his foot on the bench. As the boombox plays and the poet raps, the man taps his knee and snaps his fingers. Similarly, a Black woman in a red dress sitting on the same bench responds to Scott-Heron’s presence and his music with a committed head bob and toe tap. On another bench, three young Black men nod coolly as they watch the poet recite the remainder of his verse.It’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.He walks us through the partially-animated tableau wherein the folks sitting behind him subtly reinforce the message he directly communicates to the viewer/us.———In another interlude, three scenes are cut into one. In the first, the Capital Building looms in the distance as Scott-Heron enters the frame. He gestures toward the building and notes the ways that tours distract visitors from the real Washington:Let me tell you, those tours are all the same. They bring you around to places like this [gestures toward the Capital Building]. They might even tell you who the jackass is on the horse or the guy on top of the building, but they never show you the real Washington.Should’ve been around the 15th of January. That’s when Stevie Wonder was holding this rally. It was about 50,000 gathered there. They were trying to demonstrate and make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. But it’s always the same. The Capital. The Hoover Building. Maybe sometimes they’d even show you the Washington Monument [gestures towards the monument in the distance]. But that’s not a look at the real Washington. The one I’d like to show you is something special. You wanna see what’s happening in the nation’s capital? Come with me… (Black Wax)Since the standard D.C. tour leaves out the real Washington, the poet primes the viewer for the real thing. His mention of Stevie Wonder allows the poet to connect the viewer to that real Washington, Black Washington. This is the Washington that boasts Ben’s Chili Bowl, Howard University, and Scurlock Studios as cultural institutions. This is the Washington that would welcome the creation of a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The scene quickly transitions to Scott-Heron walking down the streets of a presumably Black neighborhood. This neighborhood is outside the purview of tour mobile routes. There is nothing remarkable about the neighborhood. Nothing monumental. The street is lined with row houses. In the background, Black pedestrians passively observe or go about their day. One young Black man smokes a cigarette as Scott-Heron casually walks past him. For Scott-Heron, these folks are the “life-blood of the city” yet he does not speak with them, perhaps because his point is not to put these people on display but to formally acknowledge who gets left out of official narratives. The segment concludes with a return to Heron’s stroll along the Potomac, where he picks up another verse to “Washington, D.C.”:Seems to me, it’s still in light time people knifed up on 14th streetMakes me feel it’s always the right time for them people showing up and coming cleanDid make the one seem kind of numbIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capitalIt’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C. ConclusionI’ll end with this. In a final scene, the poet walks in along the front gates of the White House. He holds a little Black girl’s hand and smokes a cigarette. Together they stroll along the gates of the White House. Their movement, from right to left, suggest a return. A going back to. However, this return is not nostalgic. It is accusatory. It is a reckoning with the unrealised promises that America doles out to its citizens. He notes:the protests that are launched in this country are not launched necessarily against the government. They are launched in terms of the fact that this country has rarely lived up to its advanced publicity. This is supposed to be the land of justice, liberty, and equality and that’s what everybody over here is looking for. (Black Wax)Perhaps, then, Gil Scott-Heron leaves his viewer/us not with a push to March. No. Walking against the miasma of national nostalgia perpetuated through tourism is one way to maintain a black sense of place.ReferencesBaram, Marcus. “How Stevie Wonder Helped Create Martin Luther King Day.” Cuepoint, 18 Jan. 2015. 15 Jul. 2018 <https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-stevie-wonder-helped-create-martin-luther-king-day-807451a78664>.Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984.Gil Scott-Heron: Black Wax. Dir. Robert Mugge, performances by Gil Scott-Heron and the Midnight Band. WinStar Home Entertainment, 1982.McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography 12.8 (2011): 947-963. Scott-Heron, Gil. The Last Holiday: A Memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2012.“Tour.” Merriam-Webster. 15 Jul. 2018.<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tour>.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.