Killing Machines

A clever piece of art I think, the postcard mailed to me by a friend who is, herself, an artist. She bought it at a flea market. The image’s lines are warm, supple, informal, yet the look is stark, a flinty two-tone rendering of a vintage typewriter over which looms the dire, take-no-prisoners heading: This Machine KILLS Fascists. So brash as to need a bit of irony. Witty, yet deadly serious. Where did this captivating piece come from?

Four rows of typewriter keys line up like the heads of a seated audience. They gaze upward to where the escapement creates a semi-circular stage. Over it arches the inked ribbon. Behind it stands the bare, brilliantly white sheet of paper awaiting killer words. The typewriter is mightier* than the sword. Or so we hope.

What I can’t stop thinking is another writerly cliche — that an infinite number of monkeys* on an infinite number of typewriters will, given infinite opportunity, turn out a Shakespearean play.

(Yes, yes, you are right. This is an ape, not a monkey.)

In what flawless world of the multiverse might this convergence be realized? And would such a literary sweet spot be a place where fascists dare not go?

Now there’s a cliche: fascist. This word emerged from the horrors of World War II yet has lost all nuance. It just screams. Evil, it shrieks. Oppression. Violence. Cruel and pitiless destruction. When political passions get aroused, sooner or later someone will be called a fascist. There’s even a tongue-in-cheek aphorism, Godwin’s Law*, for the tendency of online debates to devolve into name-calling. A corollary of the law rules that the person who lobs the first Hitler insult must lose the argument.

As Hitler created Nazis, a shortened term for Nationalsozialismus (National Socialists), Benito Mussolini invented the original Fascists. He started with militias of World War I veterans, Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Groups.)

The literal definition of the Italian word fascio is a bundle of sticks. Some time in the mid-1800s fascio and its plural form fasci took on the metaphoric meaning of a united group of workers. Labor organizers made the term into a collective noun for naming their unions and guilds. They borrowed the idea from Aesop’s ancient fable, “The Bundle of Sticks”*, in which a dying man unites his quarrelsome sons by demonstrating how a single stick can be broken, but a fistful cannot. “In unity is strength” goes the moral. The original fasci were fraternities of workingmen. Mussolini’s fasci of thugs were more sinister. People nicknamed them Fascisti.

Fascisti on parade in Milan, 1928

When they started winning elections in 1921, Mussolini renamed his followers the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the National Fascist Party. In 1927, he wrote the Dottrina politica e sociale del fascismo or The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism* and a new -ism for hate was born.

Something about the hateful word captures our collective imagination, gives us a label for everything terrifying that a political movement can become. What we attach to it is a lot of emotion and little content. It’s reactionary; it’s authoritarian. But reacting to what? And who is the scary authority?

As early as 1944 George Orwell lamented that “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” For his column in the Tribune newspaper, he wrote a sad and funny little piece called What is Fascism?* where he complained about “people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction.” He listed those he had seen accused — conservatives, socialists, communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, war resisters, war hawks, and nationalists. That was in print. Conversational slurs, he wrote, were crazier:

I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Here is a political and economic system that results in a reign of terror, yet people bandy about its name as a swearword, a bugbear, a cliche. Everyone does seem to agree, Orwell said, that a fascist is a bully, that fascism is “cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist.” Beyond that, the term can feel hollow, a receptacle for fear. World War II historian Ian Kershaw* famously said, “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

Then I discover a writer with a hammer aimed at something more than jelly. The prolific Umberto Eco*, academic super-star and best-selling storyteller, was a child in Italy during WWII. Old enough to observe and reflect, young enough to escape military service, Eco lived with the original real deal. His 1995 essay* first published in the New York Review of Books* does not go for a textbook definition of fascism. Instead it lists fourteen features of a world-view that he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism.”

Eco warns the reader: “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

The fascist mindset begins with a “cult of tradition” that reveres the false memory of a bygone golden age when ultimate truth was revealed. Rational thinking is the enemy because it permits, even encourages people to question this established truth. “Thinking is a form of emasculation” and a contemptible weakness, whereas “action for action’s sake” expresses strength. Modernism is abhorrent and decadent and the root cause of society’s problems, especially those humiliations experienced when people undergo a loss of social and economic status. Displaced individuals find a new identity within a tribe that defines itself as exceptional and elite. However, membership is this tribe is fraught with existential dread because the group is under attack by modernity’s secret, powerful, wealthy forces. The tribe is always, always, always in danger of annihilation.

It’s this last element, this persistent fear, that chills me most. The tribe — identified by nation, religion, ethnicity or perhaps all three in a nested package — must be on constant heightened alert, like a trauma victim. The besieged group lives in a world of endless war. Eco describes their vision as one where “life is lived for struggle…. life is permanent warfare.”

Mussolini glorifies combat in his Dottrina. Fascism, he says, “repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.” The Fascist, Mussolini assures us, “conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest.”

He adopted the fasces as his icon for eternal war. Oddly, the symbol’s significance has vanished from public consciousness. Today Westerners see the Nazi swastika as an abomination, but who recognizes Mussolini’s fasces? It’s that ubiquitous fascio of sticks again, this time a literal bunch of birch rods tightly bound and strapped around an axe with the blade protruding.

fasces - emblem of the National Fascist Party

1938 cover of Italian newspaper

Italians nostalgic for the glory days of ancient Rome (and fascists are notoriously sentimental about their lost golden age) were happy to embrace one of the empire’s symbols of authority. Romans called this the fasces lictoriae, “bundle of the lictors,” a physical object carried by lictors, the bodyguards of government administrators.

The emblem is a primal expression of raw power, much older than Roman law. Elements of it had been used earlier by Greeks, Etruscans, and Minoans. In Rome’s early days the fasces* was a punitive tool actively applied to lawbreakers — the rods for beating and the axe for beheading.

Time passed and the lictor’s bundle became ceremonial. Millennia later, the brand-new republics of America and France began carving fasces into monuments and engraving them onto documents. Since the early 1800’s, the rods and axe have been woven into the iconography* of both countries, supposedly to honor our commitment to Roman ideals of law. Not that any citizen could tell you.

Fasces bookend Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

Bronze fasces adorn the wall of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Then along came Mussolini to celebrate the fasces’ original spirit of violent subjugation. There was a reason for binding those birch rods so tightly and ruling them with the blade. “[T]his will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State,” he wrote in the Dottrina. “Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.” One big, well-ordered fascio.

This could have been embarrassing for us, except that after the war victorious Allies employed selective amnesia and, poof, no memory of the official Fascist icon and no need to question our own use of an obscure decoration.

Speaking of embarrassment, a flustered discomfort was my first reaction when I looked at the postcard that started all this. I mean, really — bellowing unapologetically that you are going to KILL someone, even a bona fide fascist, is contrary to the Buddha nature I keep trying to cultivate. And our age is so steeped in meta-cognition, isn’t it a bit gauche, even vulgar, to announce without a shred of nuance how you plan to murder your political enemies? Is that why an old-fashioned typewriter illustrates the card, so we might hark back to simpler, analog times? I must say that calling a typewriter a killing machine made this old writer chortle with glee.

And it did hark me back — to age 15, when I used babysitting and birthday money to buy my beloved manual Olivetti and a metal, wheeled typewriter stand. I checked out from the library a textbook on typing instruction and spent the two week Christmas vacation (back when Evangelicals didn’t know how happy it made them that everyone said Christmas vacation) sitting at my tiny desk, learning to type, letter by letter, finger by finger, plunk, plunk, plunk. I had just gotten a volunteer gig with a local newspaper to cover meetings of the school board on the topic of free speech and protesting students (it was 1970) and I had to go straight from the evening meeting to the newspaper office where I was expected to type the story on one of their machines. As I was too young to drive, my dear father delivered me between locations and waited in the car. His love was unconditional.

I wrote for 20 years on a typewriter before transitioning, painfully, to word processing on my first not-so-beloved computer. I bonded with my typewriters, that first portable and later a monster of a Selectric II, in a way that never happened with a string of desktops and laptops. I adored my typewriters, their stability and endurance and toughness, yet don’t miss them one bit. For one thing I am a hopeless, rotten speller, and typewriters shout it to the world. For another I am a mostly unpublished writer, and typewriters leave a damning paper trail of unwanted manuscripts. Digital documents are not so self-aware, are tidy, discreet. They sit virtually, without a murmur, suspended in oblivion, until the day comes their software is no longer supported and they are reduced to icons in a directory, unopenable. Gone.

Looked at that way, one realizes how dustless and ephemeral the digital age is, not a solid tool in it — no fasces, no typewriters — for smiting real-life enemies. So who designed the postcard with its message about weaponized machinery in the analog world?

I located Ian McAndrew, entrepreneur and typewriter mechanic, through his Iron Fox webpage* — some irony there — a delightful cyberspace corner complete with soapbox blog where he preaches the joys of the tangible world as he reconditions and sells old typewriters.

Click image for postcard info.

His philosophy statement begins,

Iron Fox Typewriters is committed to the preservation, alteration and proliferation of the last great equalizer: the typewriter. Unhackable, untraceable, and free from malware, bloatware and digital distraction …

McAndrew’s kind-hearted creed soothes my cynical heart. He advocates for writing and literacy, even commissioned an original poem* for his postcard. Iron Fox sponsors community “type-in” events and a Public Typewriter Project where host locations — bookstores, libraries, museums — display a typing machine for the writing of killer words by anyone and everyone.

Then — surprise revelation! — my musicologist husband tells me what is old news to many. Another analog machine lover said it first. Activist folk singer Woody Guthrie painted the words on his guitar in the early 1940’s when it was official policy in America to kill Fascists. Guthrie’s killer guitar is iconic to those in the know, its message part of the folk-revival movement of the mid-20th century.

So mild-mannered McAndrew did not originate his violent slogan, but then neither did Guthrie according to historian Michael J. Kramer*. Guthrie repurposed a catchphrase popular with union machinists who put it on their lathes. World War II factory workers were claiming remote credit for war sanctioned killings far off in Italy. The lathe operators were manifesting one of those cumulative “House that Jack Built” folk songs:

This is the bullet that kills the Fascist. / This is the gun that fires the bullet that kills the Fascist. / This is the ship that delivers the gun that fires the bullet that kills the Fascist. / This is the bolt that battens the ship that delivers the gun that fires the bullet that kills the Fascist. / This is the lathe that turns the bolt that battens the ship that delivers the gun that fires the bullet that kills the Fascist.

Therefore, a lathe that turns bolts becomes, by the magic of linked affinities, a machine that kills Fascists. Affinities are kinships based on circumstance and synchronicity, the invented correspondences of magic and wordplay. Guthrie’s genius was to apply a “sly humor,” as Kramer calls it, to take that kinship interspecies. First and immediately, he strips away the aesthetic aura of the guitar, reminds us that it is — at root — a machine, an apparatus for producing a mechanical effect.

In the same breath he forces the conceptual leap from the war machine to the art machine. If the war machine kills bodies, can the art machine kill ideas? Guthrie’s startling use of language brings us to an uncanny space where the tangible and the virtual — the flesh of soldiers and the psyche enraptured by fascism — tumble against each other. The battle machine is mindless. The music machine is soulful.

Guthrie’s simple slogan has inspired countless artists to expand on its dual notions that sublime art is generated from mundane technology, and that art can act as a spiritual weapon.

On a mundane note, here’s some tech levity from Ashley Pigford* — his parody of the artist as machine. This “animatronic guitar-playing robot” is named T.M.K.F. The contraption strums clunky chords, supposedly to Guthrie’s song, “This Land is Your Land,” although it’s hard to tell. The performance is sure to send fascists fleeing.

The killing machines of Guthrie’s slogan are analog devices — a mechanical robot, an acoustic guitar, a vintage typewriter. Their workings are old-fashioned and transparent, belonging to the imprecise pre-digital world when information was measured on a continuum. The gears and screws, levers and wheels of an analog machine are themselves analogous to structures that transfer energy in the natural world. Bones act as levers to lift us. A hillside is an inclined plane: the steeper the slope, the more power in water rushing down it. The earth rotates on its axis as a wheel on its axle. We may not feel that turning, but look up. It’s mirrored in the night sky where fixed stars seem to spiral around the pole star.

Human ingenuity mixes and matches simple machines to create the efficient tools of analog technology. What a wonderful sense of order and mastery is gained when our machines perform — when lawnmowers mow and can-openers open and scissors-jacks lift a two ton car. They are obedient servants, amplifying our efforts so we can pretend — for a spell — that we have mastered a piece of the material world. And spell is the right word, because our feeling of empowerment is a glamour, an illusion.

I am hearing in my voice nostalgia for a lost era of fountain pens, rotary phones, black and white movies on reels of film, for a time when behemoth old cars could be fixed by shade-tree mechanics. Perhaps this vision is my own personal golden age. Perhaps I am longing for a revelation to unveil, once and for all, a code of truth that will make life easier, less overwhelming. It’s tiresome to adapt daily, hourly to changes demanded by digital life. It’s a constant battle. I’d like to find a tribe. I yearn for companions who will stand with me against the tsunami of modernity. It sure feels like somebody out there is manipulating the world to my disadvantage.

Which brings me back to McAndrew’s postcard, to ask: Who are these fascists that need killing with typewriters and guitars? One appears to live inside me. I try to deny her. I’d like to kill her, but I suspect she’s an immortal creature — an aspect of Eco’s ur-fascism lurking inside the human psyche. We mortals are vulnerable to her fear-mongering. We want to believe we can control the uncontrollable changes that eventually kill us.

photo from Woody Guthrie’s FBI file*

Change turned Woody Guthrie’s clever slogan inside out when WWII ended and our national fear of fascism morphed into fear of communism. The FBI considered Guthrie a communist sympathizer, and the agency file on him included a photo of his fascist killing guitar. Today the historical consensus seems to be that Guthrie was more interested in art than in politics. What he wanted most was to make music with his machine. If the music served as a spiritual weapon to right the wrongs done to working folks, all the better.

Typewriter-wise, for a writer, it’s back to the millions of monkeys on millions of keyboards. I’m one of the monkeys, banging away letter by letter, finger by finger, plunk, plunk, plunk, hoping with all my heart that the resulting text might break through randomness into meaning. If it rights some wrongs, all the better. It won’t kill any fascists. But it might banish some ur-fascism. It might help us let go of the terrible human habit that is perpetual war.