"It's Always Been Thus."
You have no doubt already seen by now, if you wanted to, that clip of Sean Spicer rolling out his fake podium at the Emmys on Sunday night and having a laugh at his own expense and at the expense of his former boss. Here it is, if you like:
“Haha. Ha,” or “Heh.” That’s what most reasonable people said when they saw that clip.
What you're less likely to have seen, because you're not a demented masochist like I am, is the hysterical wailing and gnashing of teeth over Spicer's appearance. The briefest perusal of Twitter using the search terms “Spicer Emmys” reveals the horrific truth of Spicer’s appearance, which is that the world is fucking ending because Stephen Colbert had Sean Spicer make a cameo at the Emmys and the assembled crowd didn’t string him up live on TV, or at least boo lustily.
Above, Zach Braff just isn’t ready yet. Give him some more time and he’ll be more ready to laugh with “evil,” I guess. Below, our nation’s leading sanctimonious haircut, Keith Olbermann, believes the Emmys previously had some credibility--credibility about what, exactly?--that they’ve now sacrificed.
Here, someone worthy of a Blue Check-mark who I’ve certainly never heard of goes full YOU’RE EITHER WITH US OR YOU’RE AGAINST US, suggesting that James Corden is now The Enemy...
And online magazine Vox is *very* disappointed.
There are thousands more where that came from, of course! But you can only pack so much idiocy into a tweet, no matter how hard you try. For some truly horrific take-making, you need a whole column--and neither the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times nor the supremely woke politics bloggers over at Teen Vogue let me down on that front.
Frank Bruni, in a Times column headlined “The Shameful Embrace of Sean Spicer at the Emmys,” does a lot of wringing of his hands about how bad it is to let Sean Spicer in on the joke, to allow Spicer to laugh along with us at how bad Sean Spicer is. Bruni even suggests that Colbert has been faking his contempt for Trump all along. But the part that highlights just how dumb much of the intelligentsia somehow still is when it comes to the Trumppening is the following:
“The moment went viral, and I suppose that’s the point. You grab the eyeballs however you can. Trump taught America that, too.”
Trump taught America that virality is the key to success in modern America, eh, Frank? Trump taught America that what matters is eyeballs, no matter how earned. Trump taught America that all press is good press--is that right, Frank?
Frank imagines that Donald Trump is an incisive mastermind who unleashed a brilliant new undeniable reality on an unsuspecting nation--a BRAND heretofore unimaginable, rather than a tired retread of a fundamental truth about this country. The truth is evident in every stupid beer commercial and in every Bart Simpson “Eat my shorts!” t-shirt ever sold. The truth is that the lowest common denominator always sells, and always has, and always will--because some of the population is dumb enough to just straight up buy it, and the rest is all-too-pleased to get off on their own self-aware self-congratulation to do anything besides continue to lap it up, too.
“Eat my shorts!” is just a dumb middle-finger of a catchphrase, on its own. It’s a lowest common denominator nothing of a joke that, offered in a vacuum, makes only dumb people laugh, or tickles the undiscerning part of our dumb brains, anyway. But “Eat my shorts!” is also a totem, a symbol of a whole generation-defining hyper-intelligent satire that laughed at the powerful while also skewering the very people who would hear the phrase “Eat my shorts!” and laugh uproariously about it. “Eat my shorts!” has it both ways. “Eat my shorts!” sells, on t-shirts ranging in size from Plain Stupid to Self-Deluded to Self-Consciously-Self-Aware.
Trump hasn’t taught America anything, because every lesson he has to offer would require a societal self-recrimination so complete as to lay bare the bankruptcy of the whole rotten enterprise. America taught Trump everything he needed to know, everything we need to know. Trump isn’t some puppeteer manipulating our minds, he simply recognized that there was a giant market for his brand of lowest common denominator horseshit, and he sought to profit from that market--and so he has. He fills a need. "It's always been thus," indeed.
The truth (as with all imagined, powerful gods and men) is that he didn’t create us, we created him. We are not the product of Trumpism, Frank--Trump, rather, is our monster, risen from the soupy, fractured muck of our own collective disdain for “the facts” and “truth itself.” He is ours, and there is nothing we deserve more.
“Spicer’s Emmys appearance should be unacceptable because he is an accessory to an ongoing attack on American democracy. He spent seven months creating confusion and distress by disseminating misinformation from the mantle of the White House. On his first day on the job, his lie about inauguration crowd size blatantly contradicted photographic evidence. It was an act of gaslighting, seemingly intended to force the public to wonder what was true, as well as an implicit declaration of impunity: The Trump administration was going to lie, and it was going to get away with it. On Sunday night, under the confounding spell of “normalization,” the Emmys turned that act of propaganda into a literal joke.”
Is gaslighting still gaslighting if all it does is convince you that the person trying to gaslight you is a fucking unabashed liar? When did they ever get away with their lies? What does it mean to get away with their lies? Because nine months later, the most infamous lie of Spicer’s mercifully brief tenure is (of course!) still widely understood to be a total fucking lie, to the point that the very words themselves make for an easy short-hand joke about telling self-soothing lies.
Duca helpfully explains just what she means by normalization. “‘Normalization’ is a collective shift that tells a story about our culture. It is not any one opinion but the sum total of the majority’s thinking.” Normalization; see also: the outcome of a national goddamn presidential election, for fuck’s sake.
Having Spicer on the Emmys to do a brief cameo that makes fun of Spicer and Trump isn’t “normalizing” anything--in fact, it’s a pointed attempt (however silly) to show how absurd those people are. We made Trump the president! There’s your “normalization!” It’s real bad, I agree! But the downstream horseshit, the runoff, this dubiously successful attempt to joke about how bad it is--let’s not pretend like that’s the real problem.
Oh, and as long as we’re worried about “normalization,” let’s talk about this one little word, from the same column (emphasis mine):
“The context of this week in politics makes Spicer’s redemption tour even more egregious. You’ll recall that the White House is actively using Spicer’s old podium to impale ESPN journalist Jemele Hill for asserting that Donald Trump is a white supremacist.”
This is quite a strong metaphor, the use of the word “impale,” in this context--and I’m actually not certain that the violence inherent in the word is meant to be understood entirely metaphorically. As I have noted elsewhere, there is a strain in the discourse, particularly among the younger academic set, to equate speech with literal violence. This is anecdotal, of course, but I think you’d have to be paying very little attention to not recognize that we’re trending in the direction of being more censorious of speech, rather than towards more freedom of expression.
It’s not an accident that Duca suggests that Jemele Hill has been “impaled” by the White House Press Secretary. She wants you to equate a stern, stupid, outrageous request by the White House that a private citizen lose her private sector job for speaking her mind with literal physical violence. Because if speech is violence, it must be regulated. It must be controlled. If speech is violence, then the targets of that speech have legitimate claims of victimhood. Speech cannot be allowed to be free--it’s too hurtful, too hateful, too violent.
“We all must raise our voices to push back on this process before the ideals we currently hold dear become unrecognizable,” Duca says. In this context, where it’s common to equate speech with violence, the battle over “normalization” was probably lost a while ago, at least in terms of ideals I hold dear, anyway. We have normalized the idea that speech is violence, to the point that a former paid flack like Spicer must be a forever pariah of “civil” society, and anyone who would treat him with a modicum of humanity--even mockingly!--is now The Enemy.
Be careful how loud you raise those voices--someone could get hurt, after all.
