Oct 27, 2022
Televising Trivial Revolutions
Street Art Break in VR
The Black Panther Party and the Black Panther character in the ‘Marvel Comics’ Universe were both created in 1966, incidentally the same year that ‘Time Magazine’ announced that God Is Dead and John Lennon wondered out loud if The Beatles might be bigger than Jesus.
It was the beginning of a cultural revolution and it was televised, or at least parts of it were.
What does, ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’ mean?
What it means to you might depend on when or where you first heard it.
When Gil Scott Heron recorded a poem/song by that title in 1970, he was thinking of the Black Panther Party, then at its peak, making a revolution by taking care of a community in Oakland and arming themselves at the same time.
What was shown in brief televised news segments was their leaders being killed. What was truly revolutionary about the Black Panthers was not shown to the nation on broadcast television at the time.
The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live
No sitting back, just watching. The revolution is action. Some consider this rhythmic recitation to be the origin of rap.
If you heard the phrase for the first time more than ten years later, into the 80s or the 90s, it sounded different. It sounded like ironic humor. Of course the Revolution will be televised. Everything is televised.
We are all post-Jennicam, when the private became digitally public. Reality TV. If the Revolution is in Reality, it will be Televised.
And who says there’s going to be a Revolution? The Beatles sang about it a long time ago on the White Album and plenty of left- and right-wingers have analyzed the possibilities since then. Thomas Piketty and others have warned about peasants with pitchforks.
The question in front of us now isn’t about television coverage. It’s about the near-impossibility of even imagining serious structural change; ie, a Revolution.
Is the Revolution itself ironic humor?
By 2014, when Tristan Eaton painted a huge fresco up above the Rue Chevaleret for Nuit Blanche that year in Paris, he was already an established artist and he was stating a well-established truth:
The Revolution will be Trivialized
Revolutions that are engineered for whatever noble or ignoble purpose and loudly proclaimed as Revolutions don’t really make a difference. They are trivial.
To make his statement, Eaton chose one of the most iconic, most reproduced poses in all of French culture — Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801), by Jacques-Louis David — then he draped it with layers of pop culture trivia, from ‘Tom and Jerry’ to Bridgette Bardot.
Seems quaint, doesn’t it? Crossing the Alps — Hannibal sure, that was a long time ago. Napoleon knew that and the Battle of Marengo that his crossing led to was a political victory. There was no military necessity to even have the battle.
First Consul Napoleon had, in fact, just busted the Revolution.
He needed a big flashy Win! to cement his power grab and what makes a better story than crossing the Alps to beat up some surprised Austrians. The fact that his campaign didn’t actually unfold as planned never stopped the soon-to-be Emperor from telling history his way.
And he has the portrait to prove it. Five of them to be accurate. It was all part of Kingly mutual ass-kissing between the victorious Napoleon and Charles V of Spain. Five paintings of a youthful General full of energy and brimming with leadership.
The artist was at this gig for a year. I wonder what he dreamed about.
Napoleon trivialized the essence of the French Revolution, which became the national motto of France:
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
He was just another power hungry maniac, all wrapped up in stories and slogans, who didn’t mind killing thousands of people in a battle on his orders for his glory.
It took over 50 years, but Black Panther T’Challa from Wakanda was declared a revolutionary force for his 2018 mythic depiction of black people in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is also the story of an oligarchic state supported by mineral extraction, which helped grow corporate wealth and increase inequality in the physical world.
The Black Panther Party disbanded in 1982. It takes multiple perspectives to summarize its complicated legacy, but most would agree it includes discipline and neighborhood self-reliance. “Policing the Police” was a Black Panther Party idea. The Black Panther Party was not trivial and it was not trivialized. It was misrepresented and brutalized.
I think there really are revolutions and they can’t be televised because they happen inside people, or as new people gradually replace old people. Most revolutions that make a difference start small, often from the fringes.
Black Panther Party ideas about communities needing to organize and learning to take care of themselves are looking pretty timely, 50+ years later.
In non-trivial revolutions, mental models change, as Thomas Kuhn described in, “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” (1962). A paradigm shift in thinking is a revolution that matters.
We are in revolutionary times now, as mental models that have brought coherence and stability to parts of the planet for several generations no longer apply to our lived experience.
One place I am looking for new models and new images is street art.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
