Holding Out for a Hero: Julian Assange and moving beyond heroes

Time magazine’s annual Person of the Year attracts far more attention than almost anything else the magazine publishes. This year it was Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and subject of a well-reviewed biopic. The not-so-charismatic choice overruled readers’ 382,020 votes for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who currently is relaxing on an estate in England, fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges—that is, if the U.S. government doesn’t manage to snag him first.

Julian Assange is also at the center of a debate among free speech advocates, progressives, and other WikiLeaks supporters. While almost no one thinks that the timing of Assange’s arrest was free from political motives, it seems that many have a hard time separating support for WikiLeaks’ mission from support for Assange, who is accused, just for the record, of rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion by two separate women. It seems too difficult for some to understand that the man behind a site that does significant, important work might also have done horrible things to people in his personal life—and that the government might be taking advantage of that, without having to fabricate charges.

Regardless of Assange’s guilt or innocence, the problem is a common one: confusion of the public face of the organization with the work the organization does. Assange has attracted celebrity backing and prominent progressive men, including Michael Moore, have put up his bail. Meanwhile, the man accused of actually leaking much of the information that WikiLeaks has release, Bradley Manning, has been in solitary confinement for seven months without trial.

Assange seems to fit the cultural hero narrative better than Manning; the crusading, jet-setting anarchist activist versus the scared kid sneaking out classified information on a Lady Gaga CD. So does Mark Zuckerberg, for that matter, despite both men being somewhat less than inspiring in person. Indeed, the whole idea of a “Person of the Year” plays into a narrative that implies that individual leaders and heroes have more impact than collectives, than people working together.

This isn’t, of course, only an American problem. Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, wrote on his blog in mid December, after London’s student protests failed to stop a massive tuition hike making it through Parliament:

Russia to get the 2018 World Cup. It feels as if the winter closing in around [Prime Minister David] Cameron. Neoliberalism isn’t working. No joy for Cameron and the other members of the ruling class Holy Trinity – the Prince and David Beckham, the poster boy for New Labour-era celebrity soccer.

Beckham’s days as Britain’s hero have faded, of course, and likewise the U.S. is suspiciously lacking in heroes both cultural and political. Though the Assange case shows the Left isn’t immune to this problem, the Tea Party movement sprang in part from white people anxious that they’re losing power, not only politically, to the Barack Obamas and Nancy Pelosis of the world, but culturally as well.

Thus the choice by Time of Zuckerberg feels clumsy and dated and perhaps some attempt to appeal to the ideals the Tea Party supposedly professes: money, individual achievement, and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, instead of to court controversy by anointing Assange.

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Since at least the days of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion boxer, the U.S. has had cultural anxiety about white male dominance. When Johnson became the champ, even such supposed progressives as Jack London, the socialist and author, called for a “Great White Hope” to defeat Johnson and restore whiteness to its proper spot in the cultural imagination.

Now, at a moment when a protest movement has arisen in the country partly out of white anxiety at the existence (and continuing, though diminished, popularity) of a black president, it seems worthwhile to point out that this anxiety remains while there is no white male cultural figurehead, no singular hero for us all to obsess over and love.

Sure, there remain white men in positions of power—most of them. But as we look around for causes of white anxiety, it’s worth it to take a minute to examine this history.

When Rush Limbaugh, a couple of years ago, made his famous comments about people wanting Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb to succeed because he was black, he was continuing an age-old tradition in American culture. Football has served us up reliable golden boys in recent years, All-American Boy Tom Brady, who is just a little too annoying in his model-marrying success, and Peyton Manning—but New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees simply hasn’t taken off the way the others did, and the most talked-about quarterback now is rehabilitated dogfighter Michael Vick.

Pop music has its own history that goes back to Elvis and up to Eminem, of needing a white man to make black music popular to the masses. And as far as women are concerned, well, we’ve simply never allowed women’s sports to be that popular, and there’s always been a male figure to balance any supremely popular woman.

Until now. While pop has given us Lady Gaga, trampling over the past year and a half in her imperial phase, the comparable male star is Kanye West, jittery icon of middle-class blackness, confusing our ideas of masculinity, swagger, hip-hop culture. We have Gaga, Kanye, and we have Justin Bieber, a prepubescent boy with a haircut that has spawned a thousand parody sites.

In politics, while we have a supposedly-ascendent Republican party once again, there is no leader to solidify and focus the party’s anger. There is John Boehner, fake-tanned and weeping in public every chance he gets, and there are many hangers-on, holdovers from other eras—Newt Gingrich, icon of the 90s, attempting to reclaim a public virility he lost by, in part, failing in his mission to impeach Bill Clinton; or Mike Huckabee, Religious Right teddy bear. But the public face of the Tea Party movement is still Sarah Palin.

Actors? The day of Tom Cruise is over, Brad Pitt is busy saving New Orleans, and Johnny Depp and Sean Penn are too weird. Jeff Bridges is reprising a John Wayne role at the box office right now, trotted off with an Oscar last year, and is also reclaiming some lost youth by way of CGI in the 80s sequel Tron: Legacy. But even that tells us something—he stars in two movies that are throwbacks to eras where conservative whiteness was less in doubt. Meanwhile Bridges himself is still too much of a character actor to be the superstar we seem to desperately need.

Into this void stepped Glenn Beck, who isn’t sexy or even particularly talented (or knowledgeable) but by way of a certain charisma and like Boehner, the willingness to weep in public, has risen to public ubiquity in a way that even Limbaugh has not. In a way he is the perfect symbol for anxious white masculinity, at once proving and seeming to belie the myth of the meritocracy. His own success, after all, is even more unlikely if the massive liberal conspiracy he posits actually exists. You can do it too! He tells his audience, at the same time telling them, “It’s not your fault if you can’t; the Tides Foundation, George Soros, and all those awful immigrants and black people and feminists are holding you down!”

Icons like Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali (who like Johnson faced politically-motivated prosecution for the crime, mostly, of being really, really good at what he did), and even Barack Obama cause crisis because they inhabit the myth of the meritocracy, defeating whiteness at the game that has allowed it to claim legitimacy for years. Rising from humble origins through hard work and natural talent, triumphing over odds to take power symbolically or actually, they show us that sometimes that story is true—and that’s the last thing whiteness wants.

Meanwhile, Beck provides a narrative that counteracts the anxiety provoked by the loss of cultural and political dominance: it’s that pesky liberal conspiracy, which despite being laughably small and powerless compared to the webs of power and money that funded the 2010 midterm elections, pulled strings to put that Muslim fascist socialist sleeper agent into the White House (and if White House isn’t the ultimate symbol, well…).

So the Tea Party movement, which wants to go back to the days of John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Jack London (who despite being a socialist wrote piece after piece fetishizing rugged individualism), manages to function with lots of corporate money but without a clear individual figurehead, while the Left worries about the failure of Barack Obama to be the leader it wants, and argues over Assange while forgetting Manning—and the victims of the wars about which WikiLeaks provides insight.

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Where does our need for leaders leave us, then? As the country stagnates with near-10% unemployment, the rich throw lavish parties and celebrate the extension of the Bush tax cuts, and war continues largely out of sight and mind, it’s more than any one person can do to fix things.

Progressives find some comfort, facing a long, dark two years with an obstructionist House and a do-nothing Senate (which did manage to sweep through an extension of the Bush tax cuts by a bipartisan 81 votes), in the fact that the Tea Party doesn’t have a ready challenger for the presidency.

But maybe our largely iconless moment is good for more than that.

Maybe the Tea Party’s anxiety will fade if despite the widening of the public sphere for people who aren’t heterosexual white men, all of our living conditions improve. (Maybe not.) In that case, demographics are on our side. Women and people of color are unlikely to fade from the public sphere, no matter how many cries of “take our country back” we have to endure over the next few years.

Maybe progressives can realize with the disappointment that has come from the Obama presidency that it’s no good for us to pour our energies into electing one person, and instead work harder for concrete goals for social change.

After all, Bernie Sanders made a heroic gesture on the Senate floor, speaking for eight and a half hours straight, railing against more tax cuts for the rich and including a sweeping indictment of the economic system that leaves millions out of work while a few pocket millions.

But when it came time for an actual filibuster all eight hours of his speech couldn’t make up for missing votes and the bill passed. One person can’t solve all our problems, no matter how righteous their rage and how many people watch online.