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The Depraved Fiasco at the RNC: We Choose Death

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by Guy Walker

Amid the squalid cornfed landscape of middle America, the Republican National Convention took place over the course of four miserable days, concluding that Donald J. Trump will in fact be their leader, marching them into vague Edens of gold, mosaics of orange wrinkled flesh, everyone strutting in unison to their choreographed modish chicken dances, everyone putting on 3-D glasses and staring blankly at the stage. It was held in Cleveland, Ohio, a swamp settled in the late 18th century, home to the Cuyahoga River which caught on fire in the late 1960’s, at the Quicken Loans Arena which stands like a silvery plateau of troglodytic fuckery, where church pastors, soccer moms and other livestock huddle around the booming stage, everyone waiting for their instruction to applaud or sneer or laugh or cry. Cleveland was a weird choice, because, simply, it’s a weird place. As everyone knows, ‘Cleveland’ derives from the Middle English cleove, or cliff. But there are no cliffs in the the Land of Cliffs. There’s only the dreary sastruga of nostalgia for the Wild West; there’s only the porcine peasantry of modern day conservatism that is packed neatly into this carnival of hell.

The first thing to shrivel about is the group attire. The Republican Convention is supposed to be about confirming their nominee, to prep him into going into battle with the Democratic nominee, the rallying cries of all the supporting delegates ensuing confidence for the home team. And that’s typically what it has been in the past. But 2016 didn’t seem that way. It was about hats, costumes, glitter. It was a scintillating hell of lavish ghouls doing whatever they could to forget that their political party has finally devolved into a crusade of paranoid religious fanatics.

So, naturally, everyone dresses up.

Whatever your politics, one must be necessarily suspicious about a stadium full of adults who dress up in full ornate feathered costumes for a weekend to scream about guns, brown people, freedom, god. Everyone counted their pieces of flair, embellished in glitter and neon blue and red eye makeup, long ribbons streaming from their hats like tendrils-of-patriotism.

Men in cowboy hats, huge gilded belt buckles that trick you into looking at their dick. There’s a man with an elephant hat. There’s a man in a diaper. A woman who’s been drunk for 35 years. There’s a man with a red helicopter hat who physically can’t pull his finger from his nose. Most of the men wear push-up bras and expensive plaid dress socks, only because their wives don’t let them do so at home. Two men—one with a bowl haircut and an enormous man-fupa, the other with alabaster gelatin arms and cut-off cargo shorts so the pockets are just open holes—decide to duel. But there are no guns allowed into the Convention Hall, so they stand at each end of the aisle and run at each other. Their arms waving back as they run, huge amorphous mounds, like congealed buckets of kindergarten paste, cellulite and stink surging towards each other, the slow motion of their heaving bodies moan like sadness on a humid afternoon. Fog machines are lit with blue neon light, caught and captured from blue supergiant stars. The two men crash and there is an explosion, and Donald Trump steps cooly from his twinkling gates.

I could’t help but posit the necessary interactions between delegates and attendees. It was obvious at this point that everyone carried little velvet satchels of chocolate gold coins strapped to their right hip, but in keeping with theme, they’re white chocolate, engraved with quaint passages about virgins, football, and light beer. The Texas caucus read their coins aloud to each other like normal families do with fortune cookies. “Read yours, Hank! Read yours!” a woman with white-blonde hair ironed to a frizz, says to a man with a handlebar mustache that runs straight down to his nipples, everything else shaven. Hank squints, the mounds of fat around his eyes tighten as they focus on the wisdom offered from his gold coin. “Our team is Red. Whole milk is better than skim. Wifebeaters are not just undershirts, they are a way of life.” At this, the Texas caucus erupted into a chorus of hoorays and hallelujahs, everyone passing around an American flag to rub on the private parts, everyone sniffing the flag like a teenager huffs a hankie saturated with Crisco from a spray can.

“Make America Great Again” is the theme of everything now. Like preteen bff’s singing along to a song by One Direction, the genius of easily repeatable sayings is that they don’t require any thinking. Kids repeating the Pledge of Allegiance. Muslim extremists croaking Allahu Akbars before shooting a bunch of people drinking their lattes. Seemingly grown adults doing brutish sing-alongs about the betrayed Greatness of their country. Others plaster Coexist bumper stickers on their cars because it is a short gruesome virtue of the new-age hell. Others tattoo tattered feathers or incoherent Japanese writing onto their easily visible inner forearms because they are universally vague and inane. The allure is that we don’t understand them. Conceptual art. Slobbering drunkenness. Religion. Dancing aimlessly all night on ecstasy. We necessarily love indulging in things that don’t follow any intelligible goal. “Make America Great Again” is a perfect Sesame Street rhyme, cowing to the weeping and rabid animals of modern age.

So what about the speeches at the convention? Is it all a piece of surrealist performance art? Is it Mozart’s Requiem played out in high definition spectacle? Is it a mescaline trip gone awry? The convention itself was a drunken shit show without any of the comedy. Melania Trump plagiarized her speech. A speech writer eventually came out admitting responsibility even though Melania said she wrote the speech herself. Ted Cruz got booed off the stage. Joanie Loves Chachi superstar confirmed that Donald Trump actually isn’t Jesus. Expert Duck Commander Willie Robertson said that one of the things him and Trump have in common is that they are both ugly. Former underwear model Antonio Sabàto Junior groped his own crotch as he fell to all fours, squealing and oinking about how all Muslims wear their underwear backwards. Rudy Giuliani screamed until an artery broke, and he collapsed to the floor, convulsing, muttering something unintelligible, but most likely about crime. Benny Hinn, the televangelist and “Miracle Crusader” famous for scandal and fraud, came out twirling his white jacket over his head like a lasso. He knocked out Ivanka Trump with a healing blow to the head. Then he shot a beam of coruscating neon smoke from his hands that threw UFC president Dana White off his feet, the ground rumbling in a dramaturgy of conservatism ridden with dank perversity. At this point, for obvious reason, the crowd went wild. Everyone collapsed to the floor, their eyes rolled all the way back, and they began shaking violently.

After four gruesome days, Trump gave his acceptance speech. He waddled out, grabbed Ivanka’s ass with a promise of victory, and opened his mouth, the smutty paste on his lips sticking with each syllable. He sang a ghastly anthem of pride and nationalism that lasted over an hour, and relished on the fears of the people, demonizing Black Lives Matter, Mexicans, Muslims, adding that he would protect the LGBTQ community from “foreign” threat, though not necessarily domestic. He stared into our sobbing earnest eyes, and said he would make everything great again, like it used to be, before it wasn’t great, to an indefnite past, an eternal nostalgia for horse carriages and misogyny. At this, the deafening crack of thunder released a million balloons like fat American raindrops, wetting the faces and foreheads of the delegation like the healing aromas of petrichor on an autumn day. After all were healed, standing in their soggy dresses, before exiting, Donald Trump pretended he had cerebral palsy one last time, and the crowd nodded their head and politely clapped as if to say, Yes, indeed, that is an accurate portrayal of that silly journalist.

At this, the stars shined a little brighter, the night a little cleaner. The heavens looked down on its children in Cleveland, Ohio, and smiled one last smile.

The Cult of Neoliberalism

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by Guy Walker

On the television, a blonde, big-titted newscaster with brightly lacquered teeth, smiles. She adjusts herself in her seat, then looks into the camera—no, she looks directly at you—and says with imperious eruditic poise, “James Franco reveals his new tattoo, paying homage, respect, what have you, to Emma Watson.” She dawdles on, her various grunts and farts of the English language make sure that now you know things. You roll your eyes. You’re better than this: you read Camus and roll your own cigarettes. You can say ‘grandiose’ and ‘ubiquitous’ in the same conversation. You gave your Facebook profile a rainbow filter for a week. You don’t like the Koch brothers. You are a liberal and you care about the issues.

A girl you’ve been seeing texts you, and you respond “omg, I was JUST thinking about you,” in a novel unparagoned display of dank haecceity, that your synchronicity is not just fun as others have it, but it’s most likely fate or love. You’re going to see her tonight, and you have a pretty good theory about pheromones, so you only shower today with water, confident your b.o. will work its cavorting physiognomic magic, corralling her into your gallant arms, your libidinal steam rising off of you under the neon lights. You piss, shit, and jerk off all in the same toilet, the pool of scummy toilet paper and turds swirling away into the distant netherworld of sewers, nightmares, and overweight rats. You change the channel to CNN, then CNBC, then Fox, then MSNBC. It is all the same. The same white-fanged automatons hunched over their papers discussing the most recent GOP debate. Anderson Cooper turns to his colleague and asks, “Now Mason Lovebottom, on a scale of one to a hundred, how shitty did Jeb Bush perform last night?” Mason puts on his glasses, mutters a prayer under his breath, then looks up to Anderson and replies, “Well Anderson, what we have here is a queer dialectic of brothers and personalities. It’s a love story. No, maybe a coming of age story, in which two brothers clamor for beauty. George Bush has already won—he is painting dogs in his apron. Jeb will have to suffer under his shadow, wrestling with Pan in abandoned meadows. Trump on the other hand …” Their talking fades away into the sky of billions of others’ exclamations, the whole world digressing and chewing up the evening sky, as a night bird flies by, catching a mosquito in her mouth.

How exactly did the Republican Party contort itself into such a cryptofascist—and sometimes so overtly fascist—ideology? How did the so-called liberal class push so far right, especially when it comes to globalized free trade? There are landmark policy changes, such as the mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, large-scale privatization of prisons, the passing of NAFTA and the WTO, the signing of Contract With America (the conservative agenda Newt Gingrich more or less copy-and-pasted from Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union Address, detailing what the Republicans would accomplish if they became the majority party in Congress) that all occurred under President Bill Clinton for example. Critics of President Obama’s push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership call it his Trojan Horse, his corporate preference over sweeping democratic opinion, putting 40% of the world’s economy into the hands of 800 corporations. But these are merely the symptoms of an overall shift towards feudal tyranny. The Republican Party deformed into a circus of idiocy partly because of the rightward feudal shift of the Democratic Party, but more so because of the ideological nature of the beast of politic. Free trade—or the marketplace, more generally—is the idol of worship in all of this. To turn every action into a market transaction. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are generally regarded as the initial leaders in the cult of neoliberalism, in which the marketplace is god, and no thing can obstruct its growth. As an ideology, the marketplace is incontestable. And like all ideologies, its truth and power is a facade.

Baudrillard postured it as, “what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum.” A church or temple or mosque is the architecture not of faith itself, but of the signs that constitute faith. Women in their sundresses and their after-church banter are merely the tragic spectacle of faith, morality only a wad of swollen panties. In neoliberalism, the marketplace has replaced god, into flawless inevitability, into an incontestable declaration of truth. It’s another ideology of temper and balding reason. John Ralston Saul, author of Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, describes neoliberalism as an ideology where there is no memory. A refusal of history, in which fuck-ups are not questioned against the system of belief. When a child of a frantically religious family dies, after prayer and worship, the family doesn’t usually question their own faith. They move on, regretful only that they didn’t pray harder. When the United States has faced three financial collapses in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, our political and financial leaders do not question the despaired fuckery of their own ideology. Adam Smith has been jerking them off with his invisible hand for over three centuries. And even though every free market economist praises Adam Smith as their cult leader, no one ever actually reads him. Margaret Thatcher carried The Wealth of Nations around in her purse, but she only did in the way a twenty-five-year-old wearing a fedora brings Heidegger to the café, never actually reading it, but using it more as a prop to help create the facade of intellectualism and intrigue. The truth is Adam Smith was distrustful of businessmen, stating that “the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It’s no surprise then that the average compensation of worker to CEO salaries increased from 30:1 in 1970 to 500:1 in 2000. It’s no surprise that Dick Fuld, then-CEO of Lehman Brothers, was paid $484 million from 2000 to 2008, when the company finally collapsed. It’s no surprise that while dealing with the 2008 collapse, constituents called their representatives one hundred to one against the bailout, and were obviously not represented.

Neoliberalism is radically different from classical liberalism. Classical liberalism (historically, political and economic liberalism were the same, as economics was distinguished as a separate discipline in the middle of the 19th century) is more anti-utopian, more about process than outcome, in response to the over-regulated Communist centrally-planned societies. A moderate distribution of wealth is justified, because of the nature of the market: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Neoliberalism on the other hand, ultimately wants every action of every human to be a market transaction—every fuck, every sunrise, every poem, every wave, dream, heartache, laugh, shit, must feed back to the market. Because the market is a drunken god, never to be questioned.

In response to the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the New Deal—stimulating the economy through free trade, while the wealth was constrained and distributed through programs and regulations. From WWII on, the wealth of the top one percent stayed more or less stagnant, until the 1970’s, when growth collapsed and inflation skyrocketed, diminishing the wealth of the top one percent from 35% in 1965 to 20% in 1975. It was because of this dramatic plunge that the superwealthy attacked for the privatization of everything, to turn everything into a commodity—prisons, healthcare, education, war, dick.

The tendency towards ideology is inherent in American politics. There isn’t a single Congresswoman or Congressman today who is an admitted atheist or even agnostic. Belief in the illusory and wretched is a prerequisite for those who seek power. In Hobbes’ Leviathan, the beast is merely an artificial beast of power and strength, the representation of god. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is perhaps more a metaphor for the huge than its reality. Jacques Derrida, in The Beast and the Sovereign, describes the power of the facade, perhaps the abstract reality of the simulacrum: “In all cases it has to do with know how to cause fear, knowing how to terrorize by making known. And this terror, on both sides of the front, is undeniably effective, real, concrete, even if this concrete effectively overflows the presence of the present toward a past or future of the trauma, which is never saturated with presence.” The sovereign is able to transform itself into the form of the animal, while at the same time commanding over all the animals. Neoliberalism is god only insofar as it is believed to be god. The sun still bleeds at night. The animal is always singing. The cult of neoliberalism is powerful only by the death of men.