The Gangster as a Trumpesque Hero

Robert Warshow's line, "The gangster is a man of the city," chills me when I think of the oval office's occupant. Warshow's seminal essay, "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero," appeared in 1948, and has been read as a founding document of cultural studies. In Warshow's recognition of the need for critics to keep a finger on the pulse of popular culture, in his implicit rejection of a Victorian notion that only texts exuding what was deemed high moral or literary value were worth studying, lay genius: he saw how much of life and politics goes tragically unread. Warshow's idea of the gangster as a product of the city, "with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club," uncannily describes the gangster in the White House. Warshow describes the gangster as a man who makes his way independently, makes his life, imposing it on others. It's as if Warshow had heard America's top gangster brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, or grab women "by the pussy" or ignore all requests to hand over his tax forms.  The gangster (usually a "he") embodies a perverse form of American individualism. The flip side of America's innovations in medicine, technology, art, is this nihilist--examples might include Julian Assange and certainly Roy Cohn.

Warshow's essay offers real answers to the question of how this shady thug rose to political power and remains at the height of it. One of the traits America traditionally honors is individualism--we love our inventors, our Edisons, our Singers, our Bessie Blounts, our Mary Andersons. The gangster, instead of inventing the sewing machine or the cotton gin or gadgets to help amputees feed themselves or the light bulb or the windshield wiper, invents an evil self. He becomes an asocial criminal personality, usually a murderer, who allows us to identify ourselves with him until the moment he is shot or, in the case of Tony Soprano, the screen goes black. We enjoy a guilt-free vicarious experience of his larcenous, scandalous, and cruel life but not of his ignominious death. For that part, we tell ourselves, "He got what he deserved--thank goodness it wasn't me." The lights go up, the popcorn container's empty, we go home with a clear head. Again, Warshow's spot-on: "the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans." 

Try reading Warshow's amazing essay here:
http://crmintler.com/AGH/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Warshow-GTH.pdf
and thinking about the monster in the White House.