One of the most dangerous professions in the 1960s was that of progressive leader. Just about every politician or radical militant with the ability to organize a multi-racial uprising of the working class was assassinated. Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Robert Kennedy and of course Martin Luther King were all gunned down by lone nuts unaffiliated with any political or governmental organization. That J. Edgar Hoover, one of the most powerful men in Washington, the leader of what amounted to an American secret police force with thousands of armed agents and files on just about everybody had issued, in August of 1967, a memo expressing concern over the “rise of a black messiah,” less than a year before Martin Luther King was murdered in April of 1968, is of course a coincidence.

https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/814

I may sound sarcastic, but I mean it. I had once been convinced that powerful factions within the American ruling class and the American government had been behind the assassinations of the 1960s, but I have recently begun to come around to the idea that the Warren Commission was right after all. The recent epidemic of mass shootings proves that lone nuts are more than capable of acting on their own. What’s more, ever since 2016 it has become obvious that the vast majority of conspiracy theories are created from the top down to make us all stupid. From QAnon to Russiagate, from the left to the far right, every faction of the American ruling class has a conspiracy theory about why they keep losing to the other side. I’m sick of it. From this moment on count me out of conspiracy theories. Oswald killed Kennedy and he acted alone. Osama Bin Laden had no ties to the American government. Malcolm X was killed by a rival faction of the Nation of Islam who resented his rejection of black separatism. Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy over his support for Israel.

I do, however, have a conspiracy theory, not about American history, but about the fictional events that take place in Walter Hill’s classic 1979 movie The Warriors. We all know the plot. The Warriors is set in the semi-apocalyptic New York City of the 1970s. After calling a truce, Cyrus, the leader of the largest gang in New York City, an all black organization called The Grammercy Riffs, summons the leaders of all of the city’s youth gangs to a mass meeting at Van Cortlandt Park in the North Bronx. He is successful beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and manages to organize a gigantic, multiracial, and multiethnic rally in an open air amphitheater near Woodlawn Cemetery. When Cyrus begins his speech, it’s pretty obvious that he is in fact the black messiah so feared by J. Edgar Hoover, a radical leader capable of organizing a socialist revolution. Put aside your petty differences, he exclaims as the camera pans across faces of all races and ethnicities, from the palest blue eyed Irish Americans to the darkest blacks and Hispanics. Stop fighting over your petty little bit of turf. There are 60,000 gang members and only 20,000 police. We control the streets. We could organize a general strike that could bring this city to a halt. We see Cleon and Swan, the two leaders of The Warriors, a black man and a white man, standing next to each other in a beautiful moment of multiracial brotherhood. The revolution has begun.

Then horror, the kind of horror people in the 1960s witnessed so many times, Luther, a white man played by David Patrick Kelly, an actor who looks a bit like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, draws a 38 caliber revolver and shoots Cyrus right through the heart. He is just about to use a second bullet on Fox, a member of The Warriors who witnessed the assassination, but at that moment hundreds of New York City police officers, who had surrounded the park during Cyrus’s speech, rush in and break up the rally. Chaos ensues.

How Luther got past the security detail of the Grammercy Riffs, or why he decided to draw his weapon the very moment the NYPD had decided to make their move, is of course suspicious, as is the way he’s able to frame Cleon so easily. Does a black nationalist gang normally take a crazy looking white man’s word for it when he accuses another black man of killing their leader? It doesn’t seem right to me. In any event, Cleon gets separated from Swan, and beaten to death by the Grammercy Riffs. For some reason the Riffs allow Luther to escape without grabbing him to interrogate him, and they don’t search Cleon for a discharged weapon. Cyrus, we can only conclude, had an incompetent security team. Or did he? Perhaps the NYPD had infiltrated Cyrus’s inner circle. Perhaps they had Luther on the payroll. Perhaps Cyrus, like Malcolm X after he rejected black separatism for orthodox Sunni Islam, had made enemies inside the Grammercy Riffs, and the security team stood down. But more on that shortly.

The movie’s focus shifts from Cyrus to the Warriors, a multi-racial gang based in Coney Island who now have a very long journey from the North Bronx to the Southern tip of Brooklyn. With Cleon dead, Swan, a stoic blue-eyed Anglo Saxon played by Michael, is now “war chief,” and it’s clear why. Cool headed and clear thinking it’s obvious that Swan has the respect of the rest of the gang, but no sooner than he begins to plan out their strategy for getting back home then he’s challenged by Ajax, another white man played by James Remur. Ajax, we quickly realize, is a hot headed tough guy willing to fight just about anybody anywhere any time. He’s exactly the kind of guy you want on your side miles from home in enemy territory. But the mutiny is short lived. Ajax is also the last person you want in charge of anything, and his attempt to take power is quickly put down by the rest of the gang. After leaving the cemetery, the Warriors elude a skinhead gang called The Turnbull AC’s and get on the D-Train south. We flash back to the headquarters of the Grammercy Riffs, now under the command of a man in dark glasses named Masai. It is here that I really started to become suspicious.

Both The Warriors and The Grammercy Riffs have lost their top leader to the same man, Luther, who shot Cyrus and provoked a riot that killed Cleon, yet in each case the consequences couldn’t be more different. Without Cleon The Warriors are thrown into chaos and confusion, fighting among one another, barely able to find the subway to get back to Coney Island. While Swan, who was Cleon’s second in command, eventually emerges as the gang’s leader, he first has to go through a power struggle with Ajax, and is unable to keep the gang together. Fox is thrown onto the subway tracks by a police officer and killed by a moving train. Ajax disobeys orders, tries to rape an undercover detective played by Mercedes Ruehl and gets hauled off to jail. Three other Warriors make it to Union Square ahead of Swan, but get caught in a trap set up by a girl gang called The Lizzies, and barely make it out alive. It is only when The Warriors finally make it back to Coney Island that Swan’s position as War Chief is secure. In the meantime, he has picked up a new member, Mercy, played by a young Deborah Van Valkenburgh, who left her original gang, the Orphans, to join the Warriors at one of their many fights along the way. In other words, the Warriors are not the same gang under Swan that they were under Cleon. They have gone through a transformational process as the new leader consolidates his power.

For The Riffs, on the other hand, the death of Cyrus, the potential black messiah, means almost nothing. The same security team that couldn’t protect the rally from a lone nut with a 38 caliber revolver, is now a well-disciplined army full in control of New York City’s gangland. They run the local media, represented by a DJ played by Lyn Thigpen. They receive regular reports from the leaders of all the gangs at the rally that had just been broken up by the police. Their headquarters is an efficiently militarized karate studio without the slightest sign of trouble. Masai has stepped into Cyrus’s role almost as if Cyrus never existed, or as if he had been planning the coup all along. The historical analogy is obvious. Cyrus is Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca and his conversation to Orthodox Sunni Islam, a charismatic messiah, a brilliant speaker who has chosen to reach out beyond the power base of the all black Grammercy Riffs to New York City’s multi-racial and multi-cultural gangland as a whole. Masai, on the other hand, is Louis Farrakhan, a hard core black separatist who masterminded the assassination, and steps into the power vacuum as the undisputed leader of the organization, an organization now diminished, much less powerful, yet far more secure as an organization. Masai’s pursuit of the multi-racial Warriors, his relentless chase to hunt down and kill Swan and his black lieutenants, whom he has no way of knowing are even guilty, mirrors his agenda of killing Cyrus’s multi-racial and multi-cultural vision for New York City.

Masai’s pursuit of Swan and the Warriors, in fact, resembles nothing so much as the kind of organized manhunt you would see in a TV show like Dragnet or The FBI, with The Grammercy Riffs taking the place of the cops or the FBI. The NYPD in turn, even though they pulled off a dazzling, well-organized maneuver surrounding Cyrus and the rally in Van Cortland Park, seem like just another gang, their police uniforms just another set of colors. We never see a New York City police officer above the rank of sergeant. In fact, no police officers in The Warriors even have speaking roles. For all intents and purposes, the Grammercy Riffs are the police, and for all we know Luther could have been working for Masai all along. Indeed, as The Warriors fight their way south, Luther shadows them along the way, periodically making phone calls to some unnamed home base to report on their progress, almost as if he’s just another gang leader reporting back to the Grammercy Riffs, which indeed he is.

Talk to any “hip” American under 40 about American politics and culture and it’s only a matter of time before he starts talking about “The Joker.” For Millennials and members of Generation Z, The Joker, whether played by Heath Ledger in the reactionary Chris Nolan’s Batman movies or by Joaquin Phoenix in Todd Phillips progressive Joker, is the millennial skeleton key that unlocks the safe holding the secrets of history. For all of the conspiracy theories circulated by Fox News and MSNBC about Antifa or Vladimir Putin, Pizzagate and Jeffrey Epstein, deep down instead no younger person believes any of it. The conspiracy theories are for addled Boomers and Gen Xers, people over 50 who actually believe Vladimir Putin controls American politics or that Jeffrey Epstein had video of Stephen Hawking raping 15 year-olds. In reality most Millennials and members of Generation Z believe the Joker Theory of History, that events are mostly driven by charismatic “lone nuts” just above the level of mass shooters, just skilled enough in sewing chaos to have a bit of fun with a society already in decline.

If Cyrus is Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca, Masai Louis Farrakhan, Swan the prototypical white liberal, and Ajax the prototypical dumb redneck, then Luther is The Joker. Ask most people the first thing that comes to mind when they think of The Warriors and they will tell you one of two things. The first is The Baseball Furies, an all white gang of mimes dressed in New York Yankees uniforms who chase the Warriors through Riverside Park until they are finally defeated by Swan and Ajax who are briefly able to work together. The Baseball Furies aren’t so much a baseball gang as they are a gang of killer clowns, the nightmare in greasepaint that haunts Kramer from Seinfeld. After the Baseball Furies, they will immediately pivot to the the film’s best known scene. After The Warriors finally make it back to Coney Island, we see a long, black hearse, death itself covered in graffiti, pull up along the boardwalk. The window rolls down and we see Luther with three empty Budweiser bottles. It is one of the most iconic moments in American cinema.

“Warriors,” Luther chants as he clicks the bottles together, “come out to play. Warriors. Come out to play.”

It’s a creepy image, endlessly imitated by just about everybody, but few people ask the obvious question, the question that Swan raises when he and Luther square off on the beach. “When we see the ocean,” he says, echoing the original source of the movie, Xenophon’s Anabasis, “we figure we’re home, we’re safe.” Just like the 10,000 Greek soldiers who have fought their way through the Persian Empire back to the Bosporus shouting Thalatta! Thalatta! when they get their first glimpse of the water, The Warriors are now on their home turf. What’s more, The Warriors outnumber The Rogues and Swan is a far better fighter than Luther, who he easily relieves of his weapon by throwing a knife into his arm. So why is Luther initially so confident? Did he think he and the four or five Ramones impersonators in the back of the hearse could defeat the Warriors all by themselves? Obviously not. Quite obviously Luther is waiting for backup, Masai and The Riffs who appear at the very moment Luther screams out in pain from Swan’s knife. Riffs, they shout, looking slightly ridiculous armed with baseball bats and plastic hockey sticks but outnumbering The Warriors at least ten to one. It’s now obvious who Luther, who had been shadowing The Warriors throughout the movie, had been checking in with along the way. He’s got a knife in his arm, but his triumph is now complete. The reason he killed Cyrus? He comes right out and declares himself the “lone nut” of the Warren Commission. “No reason. I just like doing things like that.”

The joke, however, is on The Joker. As the Riffs surround both The Warriors and the Rogues, Masai approaches Swan. “Are you still looking for us?” Swan asks. “We found what we were looking for,” Masai says, indicating he now knows the truth about the assassination as he indicates that he has not come for the warriors but for Luther. “No,” Luther whines as he is led off to his death. “No. It wasn’t us. It was the Warriors.” But Luther’s pleas are in vain. Like any contract killer, he thought he would be allowed to go free when the job was over, but Masai has other plans. Masai brushes the Riffs aside to make way for The Warriors, who wander off into the sunrise on Coney Island, their long nightmare finally over. “Good news,” The Riffs in house DJ says over the radio. You are free to go.

Good news, boppers. The big alert has been called off. It turns out the early reports were wrong, all wrong. For that group that had a hard time getting home, sorry about that. I guess the only thing we can do is play you a song.

“Good news?” We can only wonder why Lynn Thigpen’s DJ is so relieved. What exactly is good about the day after the death of the black messiah. The day after the assassination of Martin Luther King there were riots in the streets of every major city in America. It’s easy to see why The Riffs let The Warriors go. Luther and The Rogues were a loose end to clean up. Fox was killed by the cops. Whoever really killed Cyrus will remain a mystery swept under the rug by the media, only to be discussed by conspiracy theorists and the occasional contrarian journalist and history. Masai has nothing to worry about. His leadership of The Grammercy Riffs is secure. Cleon, on the other hand, the black leader of The Warriors, is dead, killed by Riffs security, and Swan walks off with Mercy, a white woman, probably to get married and live happily ever after. Segregation has been preserved. There will be no general strike. Masai will rule his dirty little underworld for decades. The dream of the black messiah is dead. Somewhere in hell, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover is laughing his ass off.