Miles Brickman
- This article is about the senator who deals in hate. For the superhero who deals out bricks, see Brickman.
There's politicians who stoke hatred for their own political power, and then there's Miles Brickman. Having built a platform purely on the demonisation of Machine Man, he now has his eyes set on the position of President of the United States.
He seems very well adjusted.
Fiction
As a congressman, Brickman preyed on the people's fear of Machine Man to get himself elected to the senate. Coming across the work of the Committee to Destroy Machine Man, Brickman ranted to his goons that by stealing his shtick, the group was threatening his chances for getting into the White House. Byte of the Binary Bug!
Brickman was positively incensed by a news report showing Machine Man saving a school bus from careening off a bridge into the ocean, again seeing it as a threat against his campaign. With some prompting from his goons Fred Greenfield and Archie Goldsmith, he completely independently stumbled on the idea of linking Machine Man with automation and unemployment, before sending the duo out to find a way to discredit the living robot. Brickman's latest attacks led to Peter Spaulding encouraging Machine Man to very publicly help fix the bridge, in front of the assembled press.
That evening, the senator was overjoyed at the news report that Machine Man had allegedly been on a crime spree, including being caught by police at a jewellery store. He told his assembled supporters that as long as Machine Man was perceived of being guilty of something, that made him a righteous prosecutor.
A couple of days later, Machine Man caught the actual perpetrator, the hypnotised Barry Witherspoon, and apprehended Fred, the mastermind behind the heists. Fred immediately implicated Brickman, leading to him having to deny the accusations at a press conference. The senator claimed more noble motives than greed, such as destroying Machine Man to prevent unemployment, and the taking of food and money from the great American public. As the crowd cheered, he privately remarked to his staffers that this spin put him on track for the White House. The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls
A later campaign rally, held at a posh mid-Manhattan hotel, once again focussed on Machine Man's threat to the American way of life. At this point, however, even Brickman's own supporters noted that he was falling in popularity and scoring poorly in the primaries. As Brickman left the stage, the supporters advised him to focus on inflation, unemployment, and foreign policy rather than just Machine Man and the automation he represented. The senator assured them that he had already taken steps to destroy Machine Man as part of a plan to cement his reputation as society's saviour. The following day, Brickman was the guest of honour at a high society party organised by Sunset Bain. The hostess introduced herself to him, telling him that they had something of a "mutual friend"...
In the meantime, the secret section of the Canadian ministry of defence codenamed Department H had received a dossier from an anonymous source. The documents and slides alleged that, some months ago, Machine Man had deliberately sent the Hulk to cause wide-scale destruction in Canadian timberland on the orders of the U.S. government. To determine the dossier's veracity, a minister dispatched the super-team Alpha Flight to apprehend Machine Man, and the covert operative Agent K to trace its origin. By searching every federal premises within the radius of the post office from which the dossier was sent, K discovered that the quirks of Brickman's personal typewriter matched those seen on the documents. When the media caught wind of his plot to rig his own election, the Brickman campaign deflated. As his advisors abandoned him, Brickman vowed that they hadn't seen the last of him. In the eyes of the Canadian government, Machine Man was exonerated... but Brickman's rhetoric had already cut deep for the living robot who, when caught in a trap by Madam Menace, had lost his temper and lashed out at ally and foe alike, nearly becoming the monster his persecutors believed him to be. Alone Against Alpha Flight!
Related characters
Goons
Two "grade school dropouts" listened to Brickman's ranting about the Committee to Destroy Machine Man's threat to his presidential bid. He ordered them to discover the origin of this committee, and they promised they would not fail him. Byte of the Binary Bug!
Other goons included Fred Greenfield and Archie Goldsmith. The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls
Supporters
In addition to his fixers, Brickman also had something of an entourage at his campaign office and in public, among them TV reporter Dorothy Mayson. When Machine Man's alleged crime spree set Brickman off on another rant, one supporter protested that Brickman couldn't have known these criminal intentions when he started his campaign. When Brickman responded that the facts didn't matter as much as the public's perception of him, the now ex-supporter left the office, realising that the senator was crazy and had to be stopped.
Two supporters joined Brickman on stage at the subsequent press conference. The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls
A pair of supporters discussed Brickman's floundering campaign during one of his speeches. When he came off stage, they advised him that he couldn't keep coasting on the public's paranoia of automation as represented by Machine Man. A few days later, Brickman's political career went up in flames when it was revealed he was trying to sour Canada's relations with the U.S.. One of the supporters quipped that, after this scandal, Brickman couldn't even get elected as Nixon's butler. Alone Against Alpha Flight!
Notes
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- Brickman's actually a pretty big signifier for fitting the robot universe into a single cohesive timeline. When Machine Man was first published in the U.S., Brickman's political ambitions synced up with the real-world 1980 presidential election and primaries thereof, with him specifically mentioning Carter and Kennedy as political opponents in "The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls". The TFUK printing removed the reference to Carter, who had no interest in running again after getting bodied by Reagan, to reflect a more contemporary understanding of American politics. The nearest real-world U.S. election to its UK publishing was in November 1984. In "Alone Against Alpha Flight!", Brickman is still hoping to win his party's nomination for the presidency, suggesting it takes place before August at the latest, but the story leads almost directly into "Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!", which takes place around Halloween. The simplest answer is that the robot universe's nomination race ended a little later than the real world's August 1984 timescale.
- Incidentally, Brickman's political party is never explicitly specified; Carter and Kennedy could be rivals for the nomination as much as for the presidency, and only "his party" is mentioned in "Alone Against Alpha Flight!". A charitable reading of Machine Man could interpret Brickman as a Democrat... a very, very charitable reading.
