As Stanley Cohen writes in Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Routledge, 1972), Mods were a scapegoat for Britain’s woes: Stargrave is a Mod indeed, one of those unsavory youths who, 20 years before Buchanan’s address, were themselves deemed threatening to a nation. Fish, paisley underpants from Marks & Spencer and high-heeled Chelsea boots from Shelly’s Shoes!”. Elsewhere in the same issue, Morrison itemizes Gideon Stargraves’s clothes: “mirrored Ray-Ban shades, a purple crushed velvet frock coat with matching bellbottom trousers, a lemon frilled shirt from Mr. Many of the bands on Stargrave’s playlist are those listened to by 1960s and ’70s British Punks and Mods. Rather, Morrison links popular culture and subcultures with the Stealth bomber here in order to show how they, too, are dangerous weapons, capable of toppling the cultural status quo. This linking of band names with bombs isn’t simply another of those weird, seemingly random juxtapositions that are Morrison’s trademark. Stargrave releases the bomb with a vague sense of déjà vu“. The Pentagon is burning, the streets are choked with rioters and dead National Guardsmen. Jarringly, Morrison lists here the “usic on Stargrave’s earplug-sized tape player: The Beatles, The Move, The Shop Assistants, The Mixers, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Times, The Television Personalities, The Pastels, The Sex Pistols, The 5, Buzzcocks, The Byrds” even as “the bomber sidles up on Washington D.C. In one of these screen memories, we see Stargrave, having just successfully haggled over a used Stealth bomber, flying off to raze Washington D.C. In defense, King Mob lures Sir Miles into fictions, outlandish false “memories” featuring King Mob’s fantasy persona, Gideon Stargrave. Bleeding and bound, King Mob writhes under Sir Miles’ psychic assault, as Miles invades his mind to discover the secret identities of the other Invisibles. King Mob, having been shot by Outer Church agent Commander Brodie, is in Sir Miles’s clutches. And while their weapons include not only standards like guns and knives, but also psychic powers, magic spells, and alien languages, some of their most effective weapons to fight against Sir Miles and the Outer Church are the popular culture - and the nascent subcultures - that so terrify hegemons of conservative culture like Buchanan.įor example, consider The Invisibles # 17, “Entropy in the U.K., Part One: Dandy” (1996). The Invisibles are made up those very folks who haunt Buchanan, including King Mob, who has grown from his working-class roots to become an anarchist and master assassin Boy, a black woman who left her job as a New York City cop once she realized how her role buttressed the structures of oppression and Lord Fanny, a trans woman born in Brazil whose training as a shaman includes being a sex worker and taking a lot of recreational drugs. But The Invisibles is also about the very culture wars that terrified Buchanan in 1992. 23) and on the other side by the conservative, essentially white, heteronormative, and cismale dominant culture personified by Buchanan himself.įlash forward two years, and we see the publication of the first issue of Grant Morrison‘s comic book series The Invisibles (DC Comics, 1994-2000), a series which, on its surface, is about the struggles of a band of freedom fighters (the Invisibles) versus the forces that would enslave all of humanity, namely the Outer Church, led by Sir Miles. “mobs” (i.e., people of color), and proponents of “radical feminism” (para. 39), fought on one side by the emergent (and insurgent) culture made up of pro-choicers, supporters of gay marriage, L.A. It is “a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America” (para. The US invasion of Grenada in 1983, the US-supported Contra War in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and especially Reagan and Bush winning the Cold War by that decade’s end, all serve for Buchanan as exemplars of America’s - read Republican America’s - excellence and essence.Īt the time of Buchanan’s address, those wars had ostensibly been won but Buchanan warns that America is in the throes of another battle, with even more at stake, because this war is being fought on the nation’s own soil. Indeed, to consolidate party spirit for the then-upcoming Presidential election, Pat Buchanan evokes the United States’ “victories” in various recent wars in his address to the 1992 Republican National Convention. Nothing serves as a convenient rallying cry quite like a war.
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