Make America Great Again

How Trump Rallies are America’s Last Circus

Donald Trump

by Guy Walker

Donald Trump is still campaigning to be president. He’d rather assure his last dreary-eyed supporters that his “Promises Made” are “Promises Kept”—as huge banners read at his rallies—than actually try to understand the complexities of tax code or health care reform.

Trump’s rallies have always had this same desperate tone, like a house party for high school dropouts who managed to beat the nerds in World of Warcraft. From the beginning, it was only about the rallies—a Trump-frenzied gala where he could stand over everybody and flail his arms and ramble on unintelligibly. If it wasn’t about him, then there was no point in going. In February of last year, Trump didn’t attend the Conservative Political Action Conference because it was rumored that around 300 attendees were going to walk out if he came to the stage. This time, he was the star.

And now he didn’t go to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because he didn’t want to sit as a Muslim comedian stood, because he knew he would be publicly caricatured as a human pumpkin, a lasso-twirling madman who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He didn’t want to face the press because they don’t howl his name with smeared American flags painted on their chests; they don’t shove their newborns in his face, demanding that he autograph their little bald heads. The Correspondents’ Dinner was a black tie event, not the usual pageantry of red hats. Besides, Trump was in need of another hurrah, one more orgiastic blowout of nationwide tailgate parties.

Celebrating his 100th day in office, naturally, he wanted a party.  And, per usual, his speech wasn’t about anything other than why his party was better than the one in Washington he refused to go to.

“A large group of Hollywood actors” he retorts, pausing for the expected boos and sneers from people who unanimously forgot their conservative hero Ronald Reagan starred in such movies as Tugboat Annie Sails Again and Bedtime for Bonzo, “and Washington media,” he continued, pausing again, “are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation’s capital.” A girl can be seen in the background, looking around, booing because others boo, waving her thumb down in unison with everyone else, like a crowd waving the same gesture at a Roman gladiator about to make the kill.

This is normal and expected. During his campaign rallies, he didn’t wait for hired security to drag protestors out—he instructed his fans to “knock the crap out” of them. “I promise you,” he said, “I will pay for the legal fees.”

And now he might have to. During a 2016 campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, 75-year-old Alvin Bamberger shoved a black female protestor repeatedly, pushing her through the crowd. He was still wearing his Korean War regalia, his barracks cap as crisp and white as a burger flipper’s hat at In-N-Out, his shirt as stiff as cardboard. The woman is now suing Bamberger for assault; and he, in return, is suing Trump for his “urging and inspiration” to shove the woman. In other words, Bamberger is claiming to be a victim of ideological kidnapping—he’s just a slobbering troglodyte anesthetized under Stockholm syndrome. It’s the same helplessness that Patty Hearst claimed when she was supposedly brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, consequently robbing banks and later described as “a low-IQ, low-affect zombie” by clinical psychologist Dr. Margaret Singer.

How many more—and how soon—will admit under the open scabby firmament that they too are low-IQ zombies, barely literate, mesmerized by an orange mad clown with anemic circles around his eyes, blubbering upon his high stage about how rich he is? He currently has around a forty percent approval rating, which is notably high given how sloppy and thunderous his psychopathy is. More than anything, it illustrates the strength of Trump’s cult of personality—the more demonic and perverse he becomes, the more devout his followers are. In the preface to the psychoanalytic masterwork Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault refers to man’s innate lust for fascism—and not an external political fascism, but the inexorable fascism within us all that causes us to “desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” It’s why Trump’s comment during the campaign about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing a single supporter is so true. Man loves a good despot, and he will do anything he can to touch even the fringes of his garments.

This isn’t even a metaphor. Remember the viral Youtube video from September 2015 when Trump’s “spiritual counselor” Paula White, and some twenty other ministers all laid their hands on Trump, praying for his victory. At some point during the blessing, a messianic Jewish rabbi groped his face, like some hideous reenactment of Hook when the little black boy identifies the Robin Williams character as Peter Pan. There you are, Donny! There he is, the deep-fried Michelin Man who has now returned their prayers by allowing churches to meddle with future elections. But it’s more than Trump himself—it’s the true power of ideology we see at work, the stalwart allegiance that is especially emblematic of the GOP.

We can scoff at countries like North Korea for deifying Kim Il-Sung, when its citizens still hang pictures of the founding supreme leader in every room of their house, when his body is perfectly preserved and embalmed for public viewing, when a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl drowned trying to save a picture of him (and posthumously given an award for her efforts). But the apotheosis of Donald Trump is equally lurid and dangerous: because he seems to represent everything anti-Obama, many of his supporters will tumultuously follow him down into the fetid depths of depravity, like a Jim Jones or David Koresh character, the facts of his insanity perhaps not yet obvious or intelligible.

The eagerness for political cannibalization of the left, on the other hand, is the other extreme of how an ideology fetishizes in destroying itself. The recent wave of protests on university campuses that have succeeded in preventing speakers with different points of view isn’t driven by anything even mildly virtuous; it’s a wave of politically correct moral panic that suffers by its own impotence. When Stephen Colbert made a joke about Trump’s mouth only being good for Putin’s cock holster, the hashtag #FireColbert immediately began trending on Twitter—self-described American nationalist, Mike Cernovich, and his sickly band of puttering cretins began fuming behind their keyboards that the late night show host should lose his job for making a dick joke about King Pussy Grabber. They knew the hysterical left would take the bait—and they did. Colbert won’t actually get fired, but it’s emblematic of a key difference between the inordinately generalization of “left” and “right” ideologies, in how each treats their television hosts: Colbert simply made us imagine two rotting dictators blow each other, whereas Bill O’Reilly had to actually sexually assault many women to finally be let go. It’s a race for political suicide, but Trump and his marching cavalry of liver-spotted perverts are leading the way.

This image reminds us of General George Custer. An overt racist who had a knack for killing natives during the American Indian Wars, it was Custer’s cavalier nescience that finally did him in. He finished last in his class at West Point, and relished as a media personality; but it was his overconfident superiority complex that caused him to stroll into an Indian encampment in the Montana Territory, assuming he would easily round up or kill all two thousand natives. He was outnumbered and overpowered, and his unprepared invasion resulted in him and his entire 7th Cavalry Regiment being killed—the event now commonly known as “Custer’s Last Stand.”

We didn’t need a 100 days to know if Trump could competently govern a nation of 320 million people—we already grimly knew it would be this disastrous. But there’s more than a thousand days of this nightmarish acid trip left, and the only hope is how many more of his followers will pull back hard on his reins the way Alvin Bamberger is now doing. Whether or not there’s any habitable world left after Trump is gone, it will be determined by how many followed him into his own Last Stand, or if he was finally abandoned, left alone in the woods waving his jelly-soaked arms at the buzzing sky, yelling “Follow me this way! It’ll be so great. Believe me, believe me.”


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Anti-Intellectualism or Death!

trump-red

It’s official. Donald J. Trump rose his scaly right hand up beside his face, his oily fingers pressed firmly together, squinted his eyes together once more, and swore his oath to serve as President of the United States of America. The lights blazed against his crumbly gelatinous cheeks that hung on to the rest of his face, his second saggy chin fluttering in the January breeze. A baby too young to know what she was witnessing sat on her father’s shoulders, her tiny fingers wrapped around a miniature American flag, her nose blushing red from the cold.

To us leftists, this is a gruesome circus, a four-year carnival run by a mad anger-spewing clown. To the upcoming generation, this is normal. This is what all future experiences will begin to take shape around. This is the first reference point of reality.

Reality, as it turns out, is going to be commandeered by a reality television star, a diehard anti-intellectual whose most fervent supporters wave banners of their proud illiteracy. It was anti-intellectualism that won the election. It won the debates, the culture war, the propagandistic battle of blame and paranoia. Obama’s successful 2008 campaign won major advertising prizes not for the content of what he was selling, but for the branding and packaging of his message. Trump won his presidency with hats. A slogan on a hat won control of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Political campaign slogans are mantras of anti-intellectualism. They always have been. They hijack all meaningful discourse and cognitive aptitude, and summarize political leaders and the movements behind them into catchphrases and rhymes. Make America Great Again. I’m With Her. Stronger Together. Lock Her Up. “Lock her up” has the same luster as the rock ’n roll anthem “Lick It Up”—by its syllabic nature it demands to be chanted over and over. “Yes we can” rolls off the tongue like a pseudo-positivity event with Tony Robbins. “Better dead than Red,” the anti-communist slogan, is more of a morbid Sesame Street rhyme than containing any serious ratiocinative acumen. “Love Trumps Hate” clearly isn’t true. Even casting Trump as the figurehead of all our political miseries is intellectually lazy—he’s a symptom of a failing system, on both sides of the aisle. It’s easy to demonize him for all our future pettiness when the same tepid air blows across our backs. The degrees of fanaticism require anti-intellectualism to keep their doctrine afloat, something every ideology is inherent of—it needs to follow their chosen narrative while always blaming the angry god for the storm and drought.

It was the first election cycle where we heard anything about fake news, as if it was a new fad that came blazing into the scene. It’s another rising narrative that has branched from the growing trend of conspiracy theory thinking and the democratization of news, blogging, and social media platforms. There was of course pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that high-ranking members of the Democratic Party were part of a child-sex ring and satanic ritual abuse in the basement of Washington D.C. pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong. When Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, went to Comet Ping Pong to “self-investigate,” firing three shots into the pizzeria with an AR-15 style rifle, he was as definitively entrenched in ideology as an ISIS gunman storming into a marketplace.

Fake news, no matter how absurd, is dangerous. But the capital’s own paper, The Washington Post, can be astonishingly lazy and inept themselves. In late November they ran a piece headlined “Russian propaganda helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” an unfounded report that claimed some 200 alternative news outlets were publishers of Russian propaganda. Stories like this rapidly discredit journalism as a serious necessary avocation—without facts we’re all just anarchist memers with muffin crumbs stuck in our neck beards.

The alt-right is rooted in meme culture on websites such as 4chan and 8chan, where users can post anonymously, creating their own virtual echo chambers of white nationalism. There are thousands of them, herds of stinking neckbeards hunched behind their glowing screens, drawing up images of Pepe the Frog with Trump hair, and naming their most disliked mainstream Republican politicians as ‘cuckservatives,’ coming of course from ‘cuckhold,’ the porn term for when a white woman gets fucked by a black man in front of her white husband. So the alt-right is rooted in anti-intellectualism, in willful and shameless misinformation, in cartoons of frogs and masturbatory ennui.

In Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, he offers us the explanation that this brazen illiterate fundamentalism stems from the early American conflict between the value of formal education and a literal interpretation of the Bible.

In response to the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century for example, American evangelicals took more of a literalist interpretation of the Bible. Before this, churches tended to be in favor of the advancements of scientific thinking. In Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, he explains that because of the intensification of debate around slavery, many Protestant churches split into northern and southern branches. Southern branches took a much more literal interpretation of the Bible, from its littered references of the proper treatment of slaves—“slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling” (Ephesians 6:5)—whereas northern branches adopted an interpretation-based approach to their teaching, leaning on the “inspired Word of God” instead.

There was, of course, the few who tried to warn us. Eighteen years after Thomas Paine published his revolutionary and prominent work, Common Sense, he was then widely vilified for his trenchant attack on Christianity in The Age of Reason, and some fifteen years later died penniless with six people attending his funeral. People don’t like to be told their favorite tale is a myth. Separation of church and state was more than a novel concept at the time—and maybe still is. After all, there is not a single open secularist serving in the House or Senate today, and yet, every several months one of the old-crusty-fat-ones is caught touching little boys.

We simple plebeians shouldn’t hesitate our curiosities. This is a common sentiment demagogues hold towards the inquisitive masses—the voting class is seen more as a mob of drooling troglodytes to herd and sway with bluster and magnetism. In a letter to Maxim Gorky in 1919, Lenin adjured Gorky “not to waste [his] energy whimpering over rotten intellectuals.” Spineless spongey highbrows had to be indicted simply on the grounds of contesting demagoguery, even if done so only in private conversation. Look at Apostolic preachers who dance and spew their unreason under traveling tents, their mission shoving along like a carnival, full of spectacle and wild-eyed theatrics. Look at Pokémon Go, which has literal flocks of humans shuffling around aimlessly like pigeons, their necks down, their flaccid exasperation for life itself dwindling away.

American politics is much the same. It’s Monday Night Football. American Idol. It’s The Apprentice bloated to the size of an international superpower. Serious political literacy is needed now more than ever, not just to oppose Trump’s impulse for fabrication of fact, but to hoist up the legitimacy of our cause—of equal rights, action on climate change, affordable education and healthcare, to create a radical left as the most legitimate left and the most legitimate governance.

 


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The Depraved Fiasco at the RNC: We Choose Death

rnc2016

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.