Muscle, by Samuel Wilson Fussell
Podles, Leon J.
that accounted for his standing as the most important American politician of the twentieth century. Millions of Americans perceived him during his lifetime as a personal savior who had in one...
...You can't defend what you don't know, and that is one reason much of the conservative defense of civilization is more nostalgic than effective: few of the defenders are aware of what is at stake...
...The transition from things imagined to things real is a very easy one," Voigt concluded, "and men, no less than children, will suit action to fantasy...
...I was in over my head, but I couldn't stop MUSCLE: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNLIKELY BODYBUILDER Samuel Wilson Fussell/Poseidon Press/252 pp...
...He was so massive, they buried him in a piano case and lowered the casket into the grave by crane...
...His parents had just divorced and he had nowhere to go...
...He notes what they have in common (not much), but uses the contrasts to provide a startling cultural commentary...
...but there is something in the young male personality that needs T he film reports and essays in Rich- ' and Grenier's Capturing the Culture are the latest contribution to the ongoing Kulturkampf...
...But although fascist, bodybuilding is not Nazi: blacks and others whom Hitler would have regarded as Untermenschen are successful and admired in the field...
...How else to explain Reagan Administration support for such monuments of cultural nihilism as the new Museum for Contemporary Art...
...He joined ROTC because he didn't want to display his soft body in gym...
...When he reviews Breaker Morant, he chooses to do it along with Fort Apache The Bronx...
...His name was Tiig...
...Grenier has given himself a cosmopolitan education in Western civilization, which after all is the intended victim of the struggle in progress...
...The bodybuilders are conscious of their artistic precursors...
...All that was missing was a rifle and the President's travel itinerary...
...Grenier is so informative on the meaning of film because he arrives at the theater with a mind already well stocked with cultural history...
...And he turns self-invention into an art form...
...lb review The Bostonians, he gives us ten pages of Henry James's biography and associated criticism...
...He has a sense of irony, and realizes the ersatz nature of this heroism, but he does come to realize the folly of building shells as protection from pain, and is able to return to normal life...
...It is commonplace enough to say that he was a "great communicator," and, in the pre-TV era, FDR's golden voice and Harvard accent seemed neither corny nor off-putting...
...For the proper role of a critic is not so much to say why an artistic thing is good, bad, or indifferent, as to help the reader to it himself: "Everyman his own critic," to borrow from Carl Becker...
...He was the quintessential Teflon President, using the persona he sent out across the airwaves to attract a huge amount of support, admiration, and affection...
...Only the strong survive...
...he concocts a bizarre background to fit his bizarre body, so that the Mannerist reconstruction of self can be complete...
...T hroughout his book, Sam Fussell 1 uses the metaphor of bodybuilding as military action...
...As early as 1938, for example, F. A. Voigt's book Unto Caesar interpreted Nazism as having sprung right out of the literature, stage, and film of the Weimar era...
...Bodybuilding bears the sweaty aroma of Mussolini's hypermasculine ideology and of the artistic game that Futurists like Marinetti made of war and masculinity...
...Few ran administrations characterized by so much open bickering and surface disorganization...
...The ideal male figures in Greek and modern art bear little resemblance to the bodybuilder's...
...I suggest they visit a prison, or an AIDS ward, or perhaps a military cemetery, and reflect on what happens to young men in our world...
...He accepted that...
...He decided to take up bodybuilding...
...The idea of a politics of culture finds its fullest expression in Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who taught that it is futile to try to change society without first changing human consciousness...
...Paul Fussell's books on war put forth the persona of The Hero without parading his own courage: he admits to near-cowardice during his battlefield experience in France in 1944...
...He built himself up to 257 pounds and was able to bench-press 405...
...It is possible that this ethic had as much to do with his popularity among working-class ethnics as the economic benefits he dispensed...
...Young men turn to all sorts of dangers—crime, drugs, skydiving, risky sex, bodybuilding—to go through the experience that other societies provide in a structured way, under the guidance of responsible adult males...
...He is therefore able to show, for example, how the subsidized German film industry is trashing the culture of those who pay its bills...
...Bodybuilders quote slogans reminiscent of that cripple and weakling Nietzsche: "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger...
...He came down with chronic diarrhea, as well as pleurisy...
...The antecedents of bodybuilding are to be found in the Hellenistic and Renaissance Mannerism that displays a taste for the distorted, the exaggerated, and the perverse, which sets in when perfection cloys...
...Health fascists," Fussell calls the gym rats...
...At the Y he encountered "a man dressed in a singlet and what appeared to be a tutu...
...It is a type of art: Mannerism...
...Remarkably, little of this ever rubbed off on him...
...He entered shows, and fortunately lost...
...He left his publishing job (to avoid getting fired for throwing a co-worker through a door) and lived off a small inheritance...
...Was he a lifter...
...Rather, we're grateful for the opportunity to read so spirited a writer with such an uncanny ability to plumb whatever depths this shallow medium possesses...
...And to do it he brings in details from the work of Orwell that donot come out of Cliffs Notes...
...Grenier knows not only history but also contemporary Europe, evidently including several languages and the film cultures of the continent...
...Sam Fussell places his escapade in the context of self-invention, the particularly American belief that you can make yourself whatever you want to be...
...Millions of Americans perceived him during his lifetime as a personal savior who had in one fashion or another given meaning to their lives and helped them in times of trouble...
...He filled himself with steroids...
...foreign policy in opposition to totalitarianism...
...Steroid use made Sam Fussell impotent...
...Like the soldier in combat, Sam Fussell attains something of wisdom...
...These characteristics ultimately protected him from his failures and those of his subordinates...
...A smaller number of millions hated him, of course, but, while frequently cautious, he understood that leadership amounted to more than the highest possible Gallup approval rating...
...Fussell also links bodybuilding with pornography, which is an introverted sexuality...
...Dogmatists at both ends of our ideological spectrum may be outraged at the suggestion that Reagan was more a product of the Roosevelt tradition than the leader of a counterrevolution against it...
...odybuilding is a profound warp.ilq ing of sexual identity...
...He speaks of men being "in the trenches too long," and of a buttock scarred from steroid injections as looking like an aerial photograph of Ypres...
...To review Reds, he recapitulates the biographies of John Reed and Louise Bryant...
...Reagan never renounced the essentials of Roosevelt's policies—a welfare "safety net" and a strong U.S...
...She was right...
...No, that wouldn't do...
...During his bodybuilding episode, his mother tried to comfort herself by telling her friends that it was a form of art...
...The professional bodybuilder Paul Harris "revealed his marriage to his 'husband,' male model Rod Jackson, and the joy they shared in their 'children,' two dogs and a macaw named Barney...
...Hence the battle cry: Capture the Culture...
...Our estranged artistic and intellectual classes have been as effective as Gramsci expected they would be...
...n 1983 Sam Fussell graduated from I Oxford and took a publishing job in Manhattan before his planned enrollment in American Studies at Yale...
...The bodybuilder, with his bulging biceps and starved waist, is to the normal athletic Leon J. Podles is a writer living in Baltimote male body what Pontormo is to Raphael...
...What he does not point out is that bodybuilding is yet another symptom of America's failure to find a way to help its boys become men...
...The gym at the Y was not what he expected...
...The Princeton background did not fit into this persona, so he invented a new one...
...Nimrod asked suspiciously, pausing with his fork at his mouth...
...A politician with a common touch, he thrived on the affection of a majority of Americans...
...The custodians of American culture validate Lord Keynes's contention that tough-minded people who despise learning end up repeating the teachings of defunct scribblers of whom they have never heard...
...But it is no mere happenstance that he would become only the second President since FDR to serve eight full years in the White House...
...He was literally scared shitless...
...He displayed a great talent for projecting warmth and concern for ordinary Americans...
...It was full of homosexuals and maniacs busy constructing shells to protect themselves from reality...
...His size (6'4"), skinniness, and academic demeanor made him a target for all the nuts and con men that infest Manhattan...
...24.95 Herbert Schlossberg THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 45...
...I could see from the look in her eyes that her worst fears were realized...
...He's dead," I said...
...But like William Henry Harrison with his nonexistent log cabin or Ben Franklin in London with his coonskin cap, Sam Fussell engages in reverse social climbing...
...This tall, thin young man, the son of literary critic and war writer Paul Fussell, had been raised in Princeton, attended Lawrenceville and Oxford, and had been sheltered from urban American life...
...Pretentious...
...The poses they use in bodybuilding shows are derived from famous Mannerist statues, such as the Hellenistic Famese Hercules and Michelangelo's David...
...Ever the academic, he researched the subject in the bodybuilding magazines before he took the plunge...
...ne of his admirers, a young Illinoisan named Ronald Reagan, learned early on how to use a microphone effectively, then went out to Hollywood and developed the art of personality projection in front of a camera before making his way into politics...
...Above all, he conveyed a sense of optimism in the hardest of hard times...
...A cardboard cutout of Arnold with loincloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian stood against one wall...
...But just what did he communicate...
...Feminists yelp about the disabilities that young women labor under...
...In writing this book, Sam Fussell recasts his experience with a self-conscious artistry reminiscent of his father's...
...The ways in which he fashioned his appeal tell us much about the modern presidency...
...He shows himself as the hero who leaves normal life for the world of combat, there to wrestle with death and attain a wisdom and a sympathy denied to ordinary men...
...It's a more vicious system even than our own...
...Europeans understand the subject and know its Gramscian origins, but Grenier relates his experiences with American critics and moviemakers, for whom the whole idea is a mystery and the name Gramsci a cipher...
...to descend into danger before it can mature...
...18.95 Leon J. Podles 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 now...
...He also became a spokesman for traditional values...
...churches, and popular culture...
...Grenier is a cultural historian in the humble guise of a movie critic...
...He moved to California, studied under the professionals, and became a trainer in a gym...
...He ended up in a rifle platoon, saw the men he led blown apart, and was himself severely wounded...
...When it's done right, it becomes a kind of prophecy, penetrating to the heart of what makes a culture tick and unveiling what a society will become...
...I first read Grenier's piece on the propaganda film Gandhi, paid for largely by the Indian government, when it was published as a free-standing book adapted from his still earlier Commentary review...
...Secure in his position, he radiated that security to others...
...Perhaps it was the disappointment that brought him to his senses...
...But bodybuilding is also narcissistic and effeminate...
...I had to fmd something stronger, something nobler...
...Homosexuality is prevalent among bodybuilders, and it is, oddly enough, an effeminate homosexuality...
...When his mother came to visit him in the bunker apartment he had found, he was wearing military fatigues camouflaged to look like tree bark, spitshined black combat boots, [and] a T-shirt which read "Respect my spirit, for our spirits are one...
...They wear hats that say "Pray for War...
...He realized that he had started at too late an age (26) ever to have a "great body," and decided to quit in order to return to the family tradition of scribbling...
...All of the crucial cultural institutions have been dominated—if not completely captured—by the alienated haters of Western civilization...
...Anything but...
...I don't know if Grenier is familiar with Voigt, but that sentence wouldn't make a bad thesis statement for his book...
...No President before or since presided over so many economic and military setbacks (often minimized by historians who know of the eventual happy outcome...
...It would be a miracle if our consciousness were to remain unaffected by the rot...
...He certainly was," I lied...
...George Gilder's inability to get his important book Men and Marriage published in the feminized ghetto of New York publishing has analogues in the university tenure debates, film production decisions, and PEN conferences Grenier describes, as well as in the school textbook biases that Paul Vitz has exposed, NEA grants policies, mainline church waffling on homosexuality and other issues, and so on...
...He manipulated the White House press corps masterfully...
...He was tired of being hurt physically and emotionally by life...
...The transformation of Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby looms in the background...
...They belong to an important genre that we need much more of than we get: cultural criticism, in its truest sense...
...And the way to do that is to gain control of the institutions which shape that consciousness: schools, universities, Herbert Schlossberg is the author of Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson...
...All other societies have ways of turning boys into men: puberty rituals, military service, or the hard and dangerous business of learning a father's trade...
...Paul Fussell, like most middle-class parents, tried to protect his son from the seamy side of life...
...Like his father, who wrote keenly on American social distinctions in Class, he enjoys slumming...
...sexuality, after all, made him vulnerable, and he wanted to be cut off from all other human beings...
...It was quite a change from Oxford and Princeton...
...It's best read as the sorely needed debunking of a man, more deeply flawed than most, who has been turned into an idol by the "soft left," a term Grenier uses to describe a woolly-headed mentality that flits from one variant of anti-Western and anti-AmerCAPTURING THE CULTURE: FILM, ART, AND POLITICS Richard Grenier/Ethics and Public Policy Center 392 pp...
...Neither an ideologue nor a detail man, Roosevelt was a relentless improviser who cheerily compared himself to a quarterback who would keep calling different plays until something worked...
...He is like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Beowulf...
...He wanted to be a musclebound bully, so he made himself one...
...No kindness forgotten, no transgression forgiven...
...Grenier seems to share Lenin's belief that film is the most important of the arts in accomplishing this conquest...
...His rhetoric reveals a constant affirmation of the ethic of God, work, family, the flag, and the superior virtue of America...
...When asked about his father: I couldn't very well pipe up and say, "Oh, he's a literary and cultural critic, perhaps you're familiar with his latest—it's just out in paper you know, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism...
...Bodybuilders give their bodies the attention that women give theirs, and do not show the general lack of consciousness of bodily appearance that normal men have...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
