Friday, July 3, 2015

Donald Trump vs The Comedians: The Farce's Existential Import

In the flood of images and stories purveyed by mass media, the spectacle of Donald Trump’s political campaign is trivialized just by being part of that flood, since each narrative is invariably replaced by another and soon forgotten. Comedians like Jon Stewart make a show of longing to keep the Trump spectacle alive forever, but along with most popular comedians, he serves the institutions that churn out infotainments so that he’s obliged to pounce on each new spectacle that captivates mass attention, without pausing to reflect much on the deeper meaning of any of these news items that he ridicules.

For just a moment, let’s think about what’s really happening in the confrontation between Trump and the comedians. First of all, who are these people? More specifically, what are their social functions? On paper, Trump is a wealthy and famous businessman, but as far as his character can be discerned from his public image in his television shows, interviews, and political speeches, Trump is also a buffoon and a troglodyte. The mystery is how someone whose many privileges afford him every opportunity to refine himself could exhibit such gross character flaws in public. How could anyone with his stratospheric wealth and fame appear to be so uncivilized?

That mystery is solved as soon as we consider two dynamics that are at play. First, power acquired through affluence and stardom tends to corrupt the character. In this respect, Trump indeed serves as the GOP’s id, as observed by comedian Bill Maher. Those drawn to business dealings that have notoriously outsized payoffs are already more likely to suffer from sociopathic tendencies, which the payoffs only exacerbate. Younger, idealistic people who wear their heart on their sleeve are thus more liberal than older individuals who have more to lose and are tempted to rationalize their possessions with conservative ideologies that warp their mindset. The deranged conservatism of a plutocrat like Trump is only a limit case that reflects this commonplace transition from youthful idealism to jaded, old-age realism. 

Mind you, the natural reality in question isn’t necessarily seen more clearly by older people so much as it captures them in the forms of their accumulated fears and hatreds which sustain their social and political prejudices. For example, political and economic power is reserved for adults who are afflicted with bodies that gradually fail them as they enter old age. As we approach death, our control over ourselves and our work and leisure activities is offset by nature’s grip on every cell of our body, and we mitigate that maddening tragedy in turn with self-serving delusions. If you invite any older person to attempt to express his or her innermost thoughts in a monologue, chances are what you hear will appall you.

Second, Trump likely plays a role or at least exaggerates his churlishness for the sake of certain business transactions. He only seems to be carefree and clueless, whereas he’s calculated that even if he can’t be president, he can appeal to aging, white, blue-collar Americans who, as Thomas Frank explains, resent being abused by the globalized free market and are primed to lash out. Trump can profit from being a right-wing demagogue in the infotainment sector. In this respect, Trump himself plays a role much like the average comedian, except that he laughs his way to the bank.     

Who, then, is the comedian? The comedian is a truth-teller but also a janitor. She sweeps horrors under the rug, calling attention to unpleasant facts with oblique references, only to comfort the audience with the opiate of laughter. Most comedians are able to uncover a subversive truth because they’re social outsiders and the silver lining of their alienation is heightened objectivity. In King Lear, this social role is famously formalized by the court jester whose silly hat and speech distance him from the audience members as well as encouraging them to laugh at his mock madness. The modern standup comedian is likewise distanced by the stage and the spotlight, but again those are formalizations of her underlying alienation. The comedian is typically bitter from being at least initially victimized and marginalized in life, and her isolation affords her the chance to scrutinize society and thus inadvertently to be sickened by what she finds. She then consoles herself with comedy. 

Incidentally, this is why the notion of a politically conservative comedian is oxymoronic: comedians begin as losers in some respects, not as conspicuous possessors who are preoccupied with the goal of conserving anything. For this reason, the conservative comedian comes across as a mere bully who is ill-disposed even to pretend to subvert the social conventions that typically subserve some ludicrous inequity. Of course, the more successful the comedian, the more she’s subject to the first dynamic, of being corrupted by the ability to overpower others.

What, then, is the meaning of Trump’s clash with the comedian? What’s really at stake in this little diversion? On its surface, the comedian just points at a clown and encourages the public to laugh at his antics. The news isn’t that there are clowns among us, then, but that they can be found outside of a circus. The deeper truth, however, is that the clown's painted-on smile is only a symbol of the attempt to keep up the appearance of being happy in the face of some absurdity. Thus, Trump is targeted for comedy because his political campaign brings to mind both of the underlying dynamics discussed above. Trump’s status and power have evidently corrupted him so that comedians are free to routinely dehumanize him. And savvy comedians like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher understand that, whatever Trump may be like in private, he seeks to profit from playing the role of a buffoon, which he’s able to do thanks to the culture’s decline of standards. Both of these underlying facts, however, are disheartening and so comedians come to our rescue by substituting comedy for more onerous existential analysis.   

The political and economic corruption is indeed horrific because Trump represents the hollowness of all power elites, so that we ought to be struck by the question of what sort of society not only has no respect for its leaders but that openly ridicules them for being beneath contempt. Few business elites are as crass as Trump, but this is a matter of style rather than substance. In the so-called "clown car" of Republican presidential candidates, Trump leads the polls with Jeb Bush, but Trump’s xenophobia, warmongering, egoism, and uncivilized deference to the outcomes of an unregulated—which is to say savage—marketplace are standard fare in Republican enclaves. The policies Jeb Bush will be obliged to endorse at the behest of his financial backers will be just as alien to distinctly human, progressive sensibilities as are Trump’s rants, deriving as they do from the sociopathy that flourishes in corporate struggles for dominance. The difference is that Trump doesn’t disguise the regressive, macho worship of jungle law with market-tested doubletalk. So if Trump’s attitudes are mocked for their manifest subhumanity, this bodes ill for the society in which those same attitudes are applied in most walks of life. To laugh at Trump is to use him as a scapegoat for collective sins.

The other scenario, in which Trump isn’t actually a monster but is merely capitalizing on Fox News’s whipping up of Tea Party sentiments to distract the exploited classes with boogeymen, preventing a return to progressive politics, is hardly more encouraging. In fact, the cynicism involved in this double-dealing would itself be a sign of the dehumanization brought on by power’s natural tendency to corrupt its user. In any case, this scenario features a higher form of comedy in which the professional comedian’s smugness is matched by Trump’s and the business magnate appreciates that American government in general is a joke, true political power having been transferred decades ago to unelected factions of the corporate-military-media-entertainment complex of American plutocracy. Just as the comedian is burdened with insight into the unvarnished truth of human relations, so too rulers are masters of the Machiavellian norms of society, because it’s lonely at the top and the ruler has few distractions from the ugly business of managing real-world affairs.

Trump is therefore the Andy Kaufman of elite political comedy. Jon Stewart’s comparison of Trump to an orangutan is a mere trifling distraction of the mob, whereas Trump’s political campaign itself is a joke played on all of American society that’s been reduced in many ways to a theater of the absurd. Trump’s campaign is of a piece with the escapades of the too-big-to-fail Wall Street bankers: both are grotesque mockeries of American laws and Enlightenment values, but only the wealthiest, most cynical and barbarous members of that society can afford to laugh along with the elite pranksters.  

The clash between Trump and the comedian has existential significance, as does everything else in the world. Trump’s public image is farcical, embodying the absurdities of upper-class narcissism, senility, and civilizational decline. Scapegoating Trump by laughing at him with the professional comics amounts to surrendering to the natural forces that made Trump’s image the obscenity that it is. We hold a light to that persona only long enough to glimpse its ghastly contours before we expect the comedian to shoo the unspeakable truths back under the rug so that we can return to playing our roles as victims in the games dominated by Trump and the other top one percent of beasts in suits.

16 comments:

  1. I'm a bad reader - so is the short version that laughing at Trump is really kinda just affirming a status quo that has trumps in it?

    Awhile back there was a comedian on TV who touched on Kim Jong-un and the funny...but also slid over to how he's a really quite dangerous guy, not just a clown to laugh at and then ignore entirely for other matters.

    Or you mean something else?

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    1. You've hit on one of the main points, Callan. I'd summarize the article by reminding us that even a superficially-trivial bit of infotainment has existential significance, and that in this case the meaning is that it's not so one-sided (the comedians trouncing Trump): Trump ought to be mocked, but so too should the mockers who serve the plutocracy that sustains Trump and his sociopathic ilk. I see Trump's campaign itself as a form of Kafmanesque, transcendental comedy, as a giant mockery of American government and values. So who's having the last laugh, Trump or the comedians?

      I agree that some comedians here and there pause for existential reflection. But in most cases, comedy is conservative and protective of social conventions rather than subversive. It conserves more than it destroys. That's its exoteric function. I propose an esoteric one for the enlightened, in "Comedy and Existential Cosmicism," now linked in the above article.

      As I say in the article on comedy, "Both kinds of humour are means of escaping from the horror of impersonal cosmic reality, but admirable humour requires visceral hostility to delusions and the will to rest from ennobling philosophical contemplation only as needed to return to the burden in the long run. With those philosophical commitments in the background, much light can be made of our existential predicament, and this humour at our expense is like a bagpipes tune played on the field of war, to inspire the troops to face their doom with honour. Grim humour works the same as the ordinary kind, except that instead of numbing us to the mismatch between our mainstream ways of thinking and the world’s manifest inhumanity, grim laughter is bittersweet and reminds us of our mission as creative rebels: to understand our position within the undead god and to artistically make the best of it."

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    2. 'I'd summarize the article by reminding us that even a superficially-trivial bit of infotainment has existential significance'

      The weird thing about that idea is that either we stand every instant in a hurricane of meanings, or exhausted by a torrent of meanings we can't process, we stand in perfect stillness - but with such infotainment being an ephemera.

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  2. Farce is well said, and sadly well timed. Could there be a greater mockery of the American system than a ballot that reads, Bush vs Clinton? That's the oligarchy just having a laugh out loud, no comedians needed. But I'm sure it will give my animal soul salve when the comedian/commentator of the moment gets in a well timed jab at whichever millionaire stands to be elected. We'll all recount it at work like something real was done.

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  3. An excellent caution to the "tribal" piling onto Trump (certainly a vile man), Benjamin. And a reminder that what Trump believes underpins American and western culture.

    Thanks!

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  4. “Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality.”

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  5. Have you read anything by Julius Evola?

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    1. I haven't, but I understand that his works are right up my alley. He's on my list of folks to read.

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  6. Anonymous @ 9:50 a.m....I loved John Gray's FALSE DAWN, a book which nastily skewered neoliberalism (while acknowledging the failure of the social democratic project as well). And he was a Thatcherite!

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    1. Nice catch on that quote, I need to read False Dawn.

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    2. Actually, the quote is from Grey's excellent book Straw Dogs. I learned much from that book, but Grey's wrong about the possibility of radical creativity. Indeed, this is the essence of pantheism: nature is self-creative. Grey doesn't appreciate the complexification and emergence of properties in nature, from atoms to molecules to stars and planets and life forms societies and technologies. It's not just the same laws repeated in each domain either, which is why calling everything "natural" is pretty empty. There is indeed something anomalous and thus miraculous about the emergence of life and of artificiality, that is, of the worlds we build to displace the absurd wilderness.

      So Grey is wrong: we can change the world, but that's because nature itself changes, evolving sub-worlds. Nature isn't stale or inert but divinely destructive and creative. Through rebels like us, nature is appalled at its undeadness and so it vivifies its processes with artificial extensions of mind, such as cities, machines, cultures, and so forth.

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    3. I left the Straw Dogs quote, I have read that book, but not False Dawn. "Nature isn't stale or inert but divinely destructive and creative," "There is indeed something anomalous and thus miraculous about the emergence of life and of artificiality, that is, of the worlds we build to displace the absurd wilderness." Sounds awfully religious, not to mention hilarious. I think there is far more evidence to support Gray's view than yours.

      Google AI bot:

      Human: What is immoral?

      Machine: The fact that you have a child.

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    4. The idea is religious but only in the Nietzschean and Durkheimian senses. It's not theistic. Well, it's pantheistic, but again only in the Lovecraftian sense. Instead of having faith in any divine person, we should have horror and awe for undead natural forces and processes.

      As for evidence of whether nature changes, all the stuff about evolution, complexification, and emergence comes from science, not from any theology. Grey is talking about the impossibility of anything being unnatural, but this depends on what we mean by "natural." The metaphysical sense of the word is pretty much vacuous, since it includes everything physicists talk about, such as the multiverse (other universes!), singularities, other dimensions, and quantum mechanics. The sense that's relevant to my philosophy is that which is opposed not to supernature, but to artificiality, that is, nature-as-wilderness, that which is untouched by any intelligence. To not see how nature in that sense changes, by way of being replaced by our artificial habitats which exhibit higher-level patterns, such as cultural ones, is to not see much of anything at all. There's literally all the evidence in the world supporting what I say in that respect.

      I've responded to antinatalists in a couple of places on this blog (links below). Having children is a personal decision. (I have none.) But there's no sustainable morality that prescribes the end of all life that suffers in the universe--and thus the end of all life. You need living things to fulfill the potential for existential rebellion against nature's monstrosity. Without life, there's no heroism. If you don't think there's any such thing as heroic stands against injustice, natural horror, and the like, I'd say you're bound to be employing weasel words like Grey or Inmendham, stretching words like "natural" or "primitive" beyond their capacity to cover what are actually opposites, such as both selfish and selfless behaviour or the jungle and an artificial habitat like New York. I pointed that out and much more in my demolition of Inmendham's incoherent thought-streams.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-question-of-antinatalism.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/02/debate-with-youtube-antinatalist.html

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  7. I posted a Q & A of the Google AI bot. So, you're saying that the Google AI bot is wrong?

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    1. I doubt a chat bot said that it's immoral to have a child. If so, it would have been just a bit of programming by a disgruntled human programmer who happens to be an antinatalist.

      But yeah, of course an AI can be wrong. Which is worse, having children and thus forcing them to experience both pain and pleasure or ending intelligent life in the universe and thus foreclosing the possibility of happiness or of existential, heroic vengeance against the indifferent, undead natural processes that cause all the suffering?

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    2. It did indeed say this, it also said several other odd things. Not sure how you feel about AI, but if it does manifest itself fully, it's likely to put limits on human population. Here's a link to the conversation.

      http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/30/google-chatbot-philosophy-morals


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