Sometime comrade-in-arms but allthetime Virginian Whet has been decrying the Tribune’s hiring of Jonah Goldberg for a while, now, and he enjoys reminding readers every time that Goldberg’s cover image for his book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning—a smiley face with a toothbrush mustache—comes from t-shirts sported by the “Olsen Twins of the White Nationalist Movement,” Prussian Blue.
I’m here to do Whet one better and demonstrate an even older source of the Hitler smiley, one that makes Goldberg’s use of it seem all the more disjointed.
I’ve known about the Hitler smiley for two decades now, ever since I got a copy of Martin Mull and Allen Rucker’s The History of White People in America. The book’s back cover sets the stage for the arch satire within the pages by opening:
Roots. The Godfather. The Immigrants. Heroic tales of ethnic Americans struggling to find their place in the land of freedom and opportunity.
But what about the white man? You know, that anonymous guy next door in the alpaca golf sweater and the barbecue apron that reads “How Do You Like Yours?” The guy who says things like “Holy cow!” and “For Pete’s Sake!” What about him? What’s his story? How does it begin? What’s the middle part? Does it have a surprise ending?
Mull and Rucker build an ethnic group devoid of what we might consider culture or spirit, and then twist that mass into a generic ethnicity “white.” It is a sort of American ideal to use in self-modelling. The book veers over the line (or over a constantly moving line) several times, but a forgiving reading understands it as making a whole hell of a lot of fun of white vicimization, of parodying the very idea of the existence of a group that would say something like, “we, white men, are the Jew of Liberal Fascism.” That the idea that white people are somehow oppressed (say, by hearing “Jesus Christ” in the workplace) is completely laughable, and Mull and Rucker play that for all it is worth, as they both lampoon the banality of whiteness and the yearning to make something special of it. I mean, how else can one read a book dedicated “To our moms, and to our wives, who are a lot like our moms, only different”?
As a cultural document, the History remains local to the U.S. Though it limits the set of White People by locating their history within America in the title, it is clear that Whiteness is a purely American phenomenon (though overready for export… see below); White People don’t get a diaspora narrative, since their cultural markers are all autochthonous. In the chapter “White Origins,” Mull and Rucker offer several origin narratives before settling on an origin provided by Waldo Bacon at the Layover Lounge at Kansas City International Airport. Bacon describes a foxhole conversation with his buddy Jinx:
“One night, when it was just raining bullets, Jinx said to me, ‘Waldo, I’m scared, I’m scared shitless. If we ever get out of here alive, I’m getting rid of everything European I ever knew, ate or did.’ I said, ‘Jinx, ol’ buddy, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think it’s about time we had a culture all our own. I’m sick of Limeys, Krauts, Frogs, Wops, Porch-Geese, the whole lot of ’em. As soon as we get back, let’s start from scratch.’”
I should leave this blockquote without comment, but I must add that it does not satisfy the authors, who end up hunting down Jinx and interview him. When they ask if Jinx has stories about his history passed down from his father, Jinx drolly and unconsciously responds, “No, he wasn’t much of a talker,” at which point the tape goes dead, a casualty of an accidental tripping of a waitress. Whiteness is a historical dead end, with at best origins in the US after WWII. As much as no one is surprised by this, it is amusing to have it down in print in a satire from 1985.
In any case, the smiley face payoff comes in the tenth chapter, “The Happy Face.” The chapter’s opening is brilliant:
White people love symbols for things. In that a symbol is a smaller, distilled, nonverbal advertisement of a larger, much more complex and abstract idea, it is of little wonder that they are so embraced by Whites.
Mull and Rucker then narrow in on the ultimate symbol, the “happy face.” The happy face is ubiquitous, they explain, because it is a constant reminder to have a nice day. The authors, however, regret that the face is limited to the US (I took this literally as a child, thinking the smiley was a solely American phenomenon), and imagine ways of broadening/exporting/using as an imperial tool the brand to other nations. So there is an English smiley (with a monocle), an Australian (upside down), and an Italian (cut in eighths like a pizza). For the German smiley, however:
The asterisk helpfully announces that the smiley is also the official smiley for Argentina, and elsewhere the authors indicate that this is the smiley to be used if “you’re a Caucasian and live in South Africa.”
Now what vindicates this whole exercise is the end of the chapter, which announces a “Happy Face Contest” for creating happy faces for the other nations of the world. The winner, whose entry is to be postmarked no later than December 31, 1959, will receive a “closet full of Expand-A-Belt fashions,” though there are two provisos:
1. No Communist countries.
2. No erasing.
Mull and Rucker have, in lieu of creating an origin myth for whiteness (or by showing the historical impossibility of a white origin myth), created an origin myth for the smiley, locked within the most banal, vapid, conservative American forms of hegemony available. Goldberg, in putting a toothbrush mustache on a smiley, is trying to push together an iconography of hippies with Hitler at the same time as demonstrating the oppression growing from the best intentions of others. Here, with Mull and Rucker’s contribution, however, we see the smiley as sprouting from a different tradition (more in line with the actual symbol’s origins in raising worker morale in the overwhite insurance industry), rendering the cover illegible at best, and seriously misguided at worst. Taking the conservative origin narrative (boosted by the Prussian Blue appropriation), Goldberg is, instead of denouncing “liberal fascists” as the inheritors of the policies of the NSDAP, printing a million times over full color badges to wear himself down the street.
The Hitler smiley is not the authoritarian hippie. It is rather Goldberg himself, using a symbol as “a smaller, distilled, nonverbal advertisement of a larger, much more complex and abstract idea,” an idea that I’m not so sure he’s possible of understanding without distillation.
Tags: banality, Chicagoland, ethnicity, Germany, Harvey Ball, Hitler, intolerance, Jonah Goldberg, Martin Mull, NSDAP, Prussian Blue, racism, smileys, Whet, whiteness
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