Friday Night LinkDump TakeStorm! Or TakeDump Linkstorm! Or, whatever!
At some point last Friday night, I got a song chorus stuck in my head, and it’s pretty much been rattling around in there non-stop since. It’s a late first-era Smashing Pumpkins song called Lucky 13--a very heavy bit of apocalyptic-rock that I absolutely love. I can’t find a decent, high-quality version of it online, but you can listen to it here and get the idea, anyway. The chorus goes: you are so fucked / it has begun / revolution crawls / all over you.
That’s what this week has felt like--an unwelcome revolution crawling all over us, everything just thick and heavy and all fuzzed out and miserable. And we’re nothing if not fucked, it seems. This has been the most exhausting, suffocating week of the Trump presidency, right? As I’ve said elsewhere, Trump is a tyrant of our attention span, and every single hour of the last seven days has felt positively thick with him. And none of it has even been any fun! Everybody is having terrible conversations, terrible arguments, posting terrible memes--generally, everybody who is paying any attention at all seems to be having a pretty bad time.
Until late Friday afternoon, that is, with Stephen Bannon’s departure from the White House! Stuff got fun again for a few hours, with the promise of more absolute insanity to come, because this is not going to be an amicable divorce.
Bannon was at the heart of this entire week, and it’s appropriate that the week ends with him re-assuming his old position at Breitbart. After Trump’s disastrous reaction to Charlottesville, apparently it was Bannon whispering in his ear--telling him his instincts were correct, encouraging him to continue to insist that the awful drama in Charlottesville was really the result of two equally detestable, violent groups coming together in condemnable opposition. Bannon knows (and Trump smells) that framing the situation in Charlottesville as a clash between a few clownish neo-Nazis and a group of black-masked “communist Antifa” with clubs and flamethrowers is only as absolutely wrong as it is totally irresistible to their supporters. Within two days of what should have been an easily wholly denounced one-sided moral catastrophe, people were proudly, oh-so-bravely claiming the high ground above (1) “Nazis” and “Antifa” or (2) “Nazis” and “People who believe that everyone who disagrees with them is a Nazi.” The conflict had been rebranded. It was no longer White Supremacy vs Human Decency--it was A Few Fascists vs Leftist Radicals, with a healthy smattering of good people who just care about history and heritage thrown in.
When Donald Trump has been dragged, kicking and screaming, to rebuke or disavow the support of uncontroversially detestable people, like David Duke and the KKK, he has done so almost dismissively. “Do I really have to say it, are you going to make me say it?” he seems to be asking. “I disavow, ok? I disavow,”--there, I did it, now are you happy?
I think he strikes this attitude not because he is himself a white supremacist--he’d have to be something besides a Trump Supremacist, first--but because he is totally lacking a conventional sense of morality, at least in any sort of public-facing way. I’m not saying (for sure) that he doesn’t have a personal, private morality (though I have my doubts), but that every indication is that when it comes to his public persona, he operates from a strictly amoral foundation. When he considers a real estate negotiation, or a labor dispute, or a branding contract, or a group of marching neo-Nazis--these aren’t moral actors, but adversarial parties that want to extract something from him.
When he is finally reminded that people condemn Nazis for a reason, he is quick to draw comparisons to other groups that people also hate. When asked about his affection for Vladimir Putin, and how Putin is a known killer, he responds: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
The morality of any given entity or situation isn’t secondary to him--it’s utterly non-existent, a non-factor. I think this comes out of a peculiar sort of reductive nihilism--a specific sort that I first noticed in very redneck-y poor white people, but I recognize more and more elsewhere, now. They believe they have discovered the absolute base, terrible nature of our true humanity, and have no illusions about it. Everyone is just another shit-stain human being. None of us are any better, all of us are utter shit with nothing to redeem us. To pretend otherwise is just the false, politically-correct nonsense of “putting on airs.”
“You ain’t no better than me, because none of us is any better than our absolute worst selves,” they believe. All of us just crabs in a big ol’ bucket.
This is why 60% of his supporters can’t “think of anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as president that would make [them] disapprove of the job he is doing,” according to a recent nationwide poll. On the whole spectrum of human behavior, they can conceive of nothing that he could do that would cost him their support. Not because they can’t imagine what he’s capable of sinking to, but because it doesn’t fucking matter, because we’re all the same, anyway. “Because he ain’t no worse than me, he sure ain’t no worse than you, and he’s my guy.”
But back to Bannon, which was where I thought I was going an hour ago. Remember 10,000 years ago, on Wednesday, when the tiny liberal publication The American Prospect published an exclusive interview with Steve Bannon? (http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant) My initial reaction to that article was: “Holy shit! He sounds...sane! And fairly reasonable, even if I think he’s wrong about trade policy, he’s right to be concerned about China becoming the dominant global power in the next century, and what that means for the US. And he’s being honest about North Korea--he’s not a total lunatic. Whew! And he called out the neo-Nazis, to an extent!” I also thought, “That’s a guy setting himself up for the Next Thing.” I even have the screenshots to prove it, if you insist, because that’s just what I texted Abe.
Bannon was opening the exit door with this interview, preparing the world for his re-emergence with as much clarity and sanity as he is capable of demonstrating. The Times reports (https://nyti.ms/2vMfqyQ) that people close to Bannon say he resigned on August 7, with a planned exit of August 14. Then, Charlottesville happened, and he stuck around a while longer because he was the only one telling Trump what he wanted to hear over the weekend. By the time he spoke with the reporter for The American Prospect on Tuesday afternoon, he was ready to go. So he told a random reporter from an ideologically opposed publication that the President’s stated North Korea policy was absurd on its face, and opened the door for himself.
It just so happens that this all happened around the same time that the New York Times Magazine published their (very, very long) Breitbart deep dive. (https://nyti.ms/2vDdnNJ) This piece makes two salient points, for my purposes.
First, it suggests that the mainstream conception of Breitbart is flawed. From the article:
“The last thing Yochai Benkler noted before I left his office at Harvard was that his team had performed a textual analysis of all the stories in their database, and they found a surprising result. ‘‘One thing that came out very clearly from our study is that Breitbart is not talking about these issues in the same way you would find on the extreme right,’’ he said. ‘‘They don’t use the same language you find on sites like VDARE and The Daily Stormer’’ — two sites connected to the white-nationalist alt-right movement. He paused for a moment, then added: ‘‘Breitbart is not the alt-right.’’ Yet precisely because articles on the site were often less extreme than their own worst headlines, Breitbart functioned as a legitimizing tether for the most abhorrent currents of the right wing. Benkler referred to this as a ‘‘bridge’’ phenomenon, in which extremist websites linked to Breitbart for validation and those same fanatics could then gather in Breitbart’s comment section to hurl invectives.”
Second, it suggests that Breitbart is undergoing a further shift, one that is more in keeping with the Bannon from the interview in the Prospect, the one who disavowed white nationalism in favor of economic nationalism. From the article:
“If you visited Breitbart regularly in recent months, you could see a shift underway. On any given afternoon, you were still likely to encounter headlines about ‘‘illegal aliens’’ invading the country, but if you clicked on the link, you landed on an article that was extraordinarily dry — usually just a rundown of some politician’s speech, or a dry recitation of governmental statistics. Not to say the site was no longer right wing — the act of choosing what to cover and how to position it with a headline is a powerful bias unto itself — but weeks could pass in which few of the articles on Breitbart had anything like the attitude and opinion baked into dozens of mainstream sites.”
I’m not saying the mainstreaming of Breitbart and Bannon will be a total success, but they’re telling us what they’re aiming for--and it’s not neo-Nazi’s and torch marches, but the aggrieved middle.
There was so much else I wanted to get to, here, but it’s getting late. Quickly, then, just one more thing!
Tina Fey went on SNL’s Weekend Update, because apparently that’s a thing that happens on Thursday evenings in the summer, now. She did a bit about eating cake as a response to our national tire fire. Here it is, if you like:
It became A Thing, because apparently some people took it as Tina Fey suggesting that White People should just hole up in their Safe Spaces and eat their feelings, rather than actually do something about the injustices being visited upon People of Color. Could it be that this is a piece of biting satire, cleverly pointing out the tendency of people to tweet their outrage from the comfort of their couch, likely while stress-guilt-eating away their social responsibility? Of course not! It has to be the worst thing possible.
We listen to a lot of The Book of Mormon soundtrack in the car, with our kids. Seriously! We’re terrible parents, my wife and I, in this way and many others. I bring it up because I think that show, while absolutely brilliant, is going to age very poorly, given what we know of how “criticism” works. The African tribe characters in the show are a direct, biting satire of how the entertainment industry has forever used shortcuts and stereotypes to present comically exaggerated savages instead of actual human characters who happen to be African.
In ten years, will anyone be able to distinguish between it and what it was satirizing? Will the joke get lost, and the show will just be another of the pre-historic, offensive, immoral stains on our collective cultural history, like Disney’s Uncle Remus and Larry the Cable Guy?
No, we don’t have to wait that long, actually.
Book Of Mormon's Anti-African Racism Is No Laughing Matter
The Root: Is Broadway's 'Book Of Mormon' Offensive?
Why does anyone ever write or say or do anything, really? Someone will think it’s shit, will tell you you’re a shit for having written, said, or done it, and demand not an humble apology, but your enduring, lifelong shame. Because you’re nothing but shit, no better than me. Crabs in a bucket, the world over.
