Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - America & The Punisher

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

We now have many ways to tell the story of America's tilt towards authoritarianism, but for your host one image  sums up the whole sordid business: a mashup of Donald Trump and the Marvel comic book character The Punisher. In this episode we talk with Kent Worcester, author of a new cultural history of the Punisher. It's a conversation about America's fascination with, and attraction to, a black and white vision of justice and vengeance. 

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called America and the Punisher. Over the past eight years in America, we've witnessed a birth, or perhaps rebirth is a more appropriate term, of scary authoritarian political ideas and ideologies. The Republican Party's transformation into the party of MAGA is one way to tell this story. But for me, I've found one particular image that totally encapsulates the horror of it all. This image is a mashup of Donald Trump and the Marvel comic book character, The Punisher.

The Punisher is the guy with the giant skull with long bullet teeth on his chest, who basically just guns down everyone who he sees as a criminal. The Trumpisher is this skull image crowned with a shock of orange hair. The image is sufficiently generic that it's impossible for Marvel to trademark it. You can't sell a t-shirt, of course, that says Punisher 2024 with an image drawn by a Marvel artist without paying some royalty fee, but you can have a Trumpisher image without fearing going

to court. And so unless I'm mistaken, my research suggests that the Trumpisher phenomenon, like so much of this story, is grassroots, that this is not out of the Trump campaign. That a small number of independent entrepreneurs just thought of combining the two and it then took off. This is Kent Worcester. He's a professor of history at Marymount Manhattan College and the author of a new book called A Cultural History of the Punisher, Marvel Comics, and the politics of vengeance. The American rights fascination with and attraction to this comic book character is one of the themes in his book. It turns out Donald Trump and Frank Castle, The Punisher, have a lot in common. But The Punisher is a true American character. I spoke with Kent Worcester about the Punisher's popularity and history in comic books, movies, and television. Kent is especially interested in the Punisher's origins.

He made his Marvel Universe debut in the gritty 1970s and then got his own title in the early Reagan 1980s. The origin story for the Punisher is very simple. He is a military veteran, a decorated war hero, Vietnam. He's done three tours of duty. He's with his family, who he hasn't seen much, two kids and his high school sweetheart. And they stumble onto a mob hit in Central Park while they're having a picnic and the family is shot and only the father survives and after that he goes on a anti-crime murder spree. The family dies in Central Park, and so the location of their death

has a profoundly kind of social and political meaning. It is not an anonymous back alley in the case of Batman. And so I think from the beginning, you have a comic book character whose story is about how readers and writers and artists feel about New York, as well as how they feel about the character. An anonymous tip led police to this house in Queens where Castle was fleeing the scene. I don't think it's possible to disentangle the character

and his ups and downs, the sort of changing nature of his stories, without understanding that connection to New York. Now, the ironic thing is that because he's a Vietnam veteran, many writers have pigeonholed him as a troubled vet. And yet, when you read the roughly 1,000 comics that have been published featuring the character, you realize that very few of those stories are set in Vietnam. Very few of them even mention Vietnam. And I think the issue about New York pre-exists Vietnam and it post-tates Vietnam.

And what happens is that Vietnam confirms what he already is thinking about in terms of his own city, that elites have failed, that the liberals have failed, that the post-war promise has soured, and that the only reasonable remedy is violence. And so this idea of righteous vigilantism is very contemporary or feels

very, very contemporary. It connects with a lot what's going on with the extreme right-wing view of law and order at this moment. And we're going to talk about that. But I want to first talk about one of the main theses of your book is that this is very much entwined with the birth of this character. The 70s and the 80s, especially sort of the rise of the Reagan years, is when this character comes to prominence. And it's very important not to lose focus on that. What's that all about?

Well, I didn't start the book planning to write about the present. I mean, keep in mind that I thought about writing a Punisher book as early as the late 80s. And there's a very simple reason for that. I came to New York in 83. I'd visited the city several times before that. But I came to New York in 83 to go to graduate school in political science. What I was struck by as a person living in the city was the absolute gap between what we were talking about in our classes, which had to do with party coalitions and social democracy and the rise of green parties and Christian Democratic parties and Latin American regimes and so on and so forth. And then my experiences walking outside the classroom as a New Yorker watching rising crime shape, reshape the politics of the Upper West Side, right?

Giuliani loses his first election, I forget which year, in the 80s, wins the second one, one of the neighborhoods that's crucial to his victories, the Upper West Side, because that 250,000 base of liberal and left New Yorkers had been sufficiently scarred by crime that they were willing to consider a law and order candidate. I did decide after working on this project that we've in a way misunderstood the 70s. We've understood the 70s in a way through various this nexus of politics, crime, and social attitudes, what we're looking at really is the long 70s. And the long 70s, I think, starts around 1968, 69, when New York starts to experience significant deindustrialization. There is really quite a sharp downturn at the end of the decade. And then, of course, rather than recovering,

the city plunges into an even deeper crisis in the mid-70s. Now, that crisis takes different forms. There's a financial crisis. That piece of the story is resolved within a few years as a result of the banker's intervention, right? The famous crisis regime that puts New York's finances on a new footing. So for the first time, you pay tuition to go to CUNY, so on and so forth. That's only one way of telling the story of New York. Another way of telling the story of New York is that the murder rate only peaks in 1990-91. It's still extraordinarily high through the mid-90s. It's still above 1,500 a year. And it's only in the late 90s and early 2000s that you begin to get the city that we now credit to Giuliani. So the violence and the level of anxiety and all the ways that plays out, all the stories New Yorkers tell

themselves, that process is a 15 or 20 year process. It's not a one or two year fiscal crisis. It's an urban crisis that lasts decades. And it's only in the context of that crisis that you can understand a all-ages comic book character whose daily activity consists of planning for murder. Frank Castle is working class, as you point out in your book, at this moment in the 70s when everything goes wrong and his family is killed. Today, New York City has a very fraught relationship with working class. It's becoming more and more impossible to be here. And there's a way to sort of see the Punisher as rage is connected to that. And as you were sort of working through this project and just being a New Yorker yourself, another way to filter this through your own lens,

what do you think we can say about how important his working class identity was to the mythos of this character? I've been to too many comic book stores where I have seen not only white but non-white males gravitate to the Punisher. I've seen too many tattoos on African-American and Hispanic men to doubt the Punisher's cross-racial appeal, that that kind of working class male solidarity is very strong and that you don't have to convince a reader that this is a character who's in touch with that worldview.

And much of our culture, of course, is not. You run around the city like it's your damn shooting gallery. What do you do? what do you do? In many Punisher storylines, Frank Castle gets into philosophical arguments with other heroes in the Marvel Universe. Here,

he's debating crime with Daredevil. You goddamn right I do. You shut up a hospital. Yeah, nobody got hurt or didn't deserve it. What about you, Frank? What happens the day someone decides you deserve it? I'll tell you what. They better not miss.

One of my favorite Punisher-type stories, not specific, but in a sort of general story-type sense, is where you place the Punisher in a conspiracy that's much more gray than he wants to deal with. Because, of course, if you think about it, in 1974, he arrives and he's wearing white boots, black clothes, white gloves. And you wonder, why is this man in white and black? Why isn't he wearing all black? He's going to be in the nighttime. And, of course, that's symbolic. They're saying this is a black and white thinker.

I think there's something marvelous that happens when you have a black and white thinker who says, who do I point my gun at? And he then finds out that there's a conspiracy with, you know, layers of mist and steam and the juxtaposition between the character and maybe some readers who just want the simplest answer possible and a world that resists simple answers. That, I think, offers incredible storytelling opportunities. Fascinating. But also, it does seem to sort of say that we can't talk about the systemic issues. We can only get mad about what we might be able to see in front of our faces and apply punishment or retribution to that. That itself, I mean, it is a very right-wing framing. I mean, that's like basically what dictators have used, you know used throughout history. And I would say maybe a way to talk about that

is a storyline that you talk about in your book from the 80s. Let's talk about this image. What are we looking at here? Mike Barron has a two-part story in the late 80s where the Punisher, in order to go on the run and not be recognized, works with a heroin-addicted former doctor who has an experimental treatment that allows to turn a white person into an African-American person. And the treatment lasts for something like a month. And of course, the story conflates skin color with social experience.

So how the Punisher walks, how he talks, how he greets people, all of this suddenly becomes black, even though the only thing that's changed is his medical operation. So it's an exceedingly silly story. And I'm not sure- Preposterous story. Preposterous story. And I'm not sure how Marvel didn't even then realize that they were stepping onto the thinnest of ice. The hilarious thing is that all of the players, Don Daly, Mike Barron, the artists, so on and so forth, now deny that it was their idea. Marvel brings in to write some of the dialogue. They're only one of two African-American staff members in order to make the thing a little more palatable.

I feel so sorry. I feel so sorry for that guy. It looked like Marcus McLaren is given the credit of rescuing the... Crypting a cyst. Exactly. Yes. I hope they wrote him a big check. But what happens? What does the Punisher learn from this experience? Well, there is in passing a reference to police beating where it's pretty clear that these police officers, he's now in Chicago as he escapes New York, are not just beating him because he doesn't have the right, you know, whatever papers, you know, he can't explain why he's there. But that race is

part of their animus. And, you know, he says something to himself like, you know, I never liked injustice even when I was white. So there is a kind of momentary recognition that race matters. But it's not a story that they return to. It's not like the Punisher is going to talk about race in his own kind of dialogue. I think there's something different going on. And the race, the race is a fascinating place to look when you're talking about the Punisher, because, of course, you have this, you know, character who wants to make things simple. And, of course, race makes things complicated, which in a way is often why these stories do an end run around racial questions. I guess for me, what I saw in this story is that something that's at the core of vigilantism itself, which is the idea that we're not out here to deal with systematic problems of crime. We are dealing with the symptoms. We're just going to blow away the guys we can see.

And this really comes out in a tale you talk about called The Slavers, which is when the Punisher ends up taking on a child prostitution ring from, you know, Eastern Europe. Yeah, really scary people. And he understands and learns that it's a giant global systemic problem. But he says out loud, he says, I'm only taking out this group and I'm out of here. He has no plan to take on the harder issue of the systemic problems itself. And this seems to me to really get at the black and white aspects of this character work. In other words, the gray equals the systemic issues. And we're going to keep him focused on shooting down the people we can see. That really ties in with vigilantism itself, I feel. I think that's a very good point. The gray is there. I think a good Punisher story tells us that the gray is there, but still walks within the black and white.

I recorded this conversation about a month before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But I was editing this episode when it happened. And when I saw that image of Donald Trump with his fist in the air, I gasped out loud. I felt like I was witnessing a real flesh and blood Trumpisher. As Kent Worcester points out in his book, Frank Castle and Donald Trump really do have a lot in common. Trump is not only a New Yorker, but he's a New Yorker who, like the Punisher, is shaped by the 70s and 80s, and the long 70s are in his rhetoric, not just in the comic book rhetoric. He's also a New Yorker from Queens who thought post-war America was going pretty well and then is puzzled and appalled and angered by this sudden, stark collapse. And if anything, Trump has pushed harder on those themes in this election in 2024. I am your vengeance.

I am your retribution. But it's very – a punisher thing to say. Yeah, it is a very punisher thing to say. Yeah, it is a very punisher thing to say and Hannity recently on Fox tried to get him to kind of tried to get Trump

to back off and to say, well, we'll use the legal system but no, Trump wants to sound like the punisher in part because

he is shaped by the same social crisis. Underneath this is a question of deep political thinking that we don't necessarily have a good handle on. The punisher is not a citizen. And it turns out that I think if you follow my argument, you'll realize that many Americans do not think of themselves as citizens. The concept of the citizen comes from, of course, Rome.

And the idea is that being a citizen carries with it enormous privileges, but also responsibilities. Responsibilities not just to pay taxes, but military service and also to be vigilant on behalf of the community, right? There is a kind of communitarian bias built into the Roman notion of the citizen. Now, in America, you get people, punisher types who will call themselves free citizens, but they aren't actually citizens in that Roman sense. What they are is freemen. Freeman is a Germanic term brought into English from the Saxons, and the freeman is somebody in the community with a special status. A freeman is a status accorded to you by the king.

The idea of a freeman was not that you owed something to the community. The idea of the freeman was that you were in a special relationship with the state, that the government could not, apart from minimal taxes, that the government could not ask anything of you, that a freeman status meant that you had the right to be left alone and to protect your property. And of course, as the United States emerges, many of our ideas about who we are as people are Freeman ideas, not citizen ideas. And I think if you take all that kind of intellectual history and you take us to the present, we have two political parties. We have a Freeman party and a citizen party.

I think in 2024, we need to think as citizens, right? We need to think about environmental issues and we need to think about the impact of- The gray issues. The gray issues. The stuff beyond the black and white. Exactly. We need to think about our impact on the natural environment and climate change and so on. We need to coordinate with Canada and Mexico over all kinds of issues from environment to labor to crime and so on and so forth. So the Punisher, of course, says all of that leads to liberal gunk. And that the honest stance is to value that which is close to you, such as wife and children,

to buy the guns and weapons that allow you to defend the things you love, and to want a government that looks at the world the same way. That's fascinating to think of the Punisher as the paramilitary of the Freemen. Yeah, he is the figure who protects the free men. You don't have a successful Trump vision of America without enforcement. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called America and the Punisher. The Theory of Everything is produced by me, Benjamin Walker.

Kent Worcester's new book is called A Cultural History of the Punisher, and it's out now from University of Chicago Press. You can find links to more on the show page at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud and founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at Radiotopia.fm.