[Edited Message Follows] [Reason: Sorry for bandwidth, but edited two sentences that were missing important components.]
My takeaway is the idea that Trump is an artist in the same way Hitler was--a bad artist who nonetheless concentrates and invokes an aesthetic capable of inducing "the masses" to forget their self-interest and sacrifice themselves to a false ideal. The ideal is not false in that it invokes and encourages a realistic awareness of ethnic and sexual privilege, but it is false in that it sells the idea that if you abandon logic and fact and immerse yourself in the ecstasy of the abundantly provided spectacle, you will be safe. One of the advantages of using this idea to analyze Trumpism is that it can counter the "liberal" art fetish, which transforms the raw American celebration of greedy man;iness into the kinder, gentler ideology of "cre-uh-tivituh" and the supreme importance of the terribly creative inner self, which figures so prominently in the ideology of gentrification and the avantgarde liberal version of late capitalism. That is the ideology of "work on the self": the sense that when one is standing in one's perfectly renovated kitchen in a townhouse rescued from "them"--who still threaten to "take away our dog park"--in an exquisitely tasteful glow of perspiration with just a tiny strand of loose hair accenting the heightened color of ones complexion , in a pair of two hundred dollar designer leggins with one leg pulled up behind in a perfectly exectuted stretch as specified by a very good personal trainer--while contemplating the perfect mix of floral notes for one's exquisite dooryard garden--one is "doing something" to "make the world a better place." What better antidote for the sickening neoliberal creativity hogwash than to back away from "the arts" to a severely critical distance and stop worshiping the almighty rainbow of inner creativity altogether? If Trump is an artist, is artistry in and of itself a humanistic cause worth dying for after all? Can we spend a day without wallowing in recorded music or mooning over the greatness of this or that half-forgotten blues guitarist--or drinking deep of the eternal sensitivity of those petty bourgeois menus that metaphorically recolonize the world by appropriating formerly "exotic" foreign delicacies into a "mainstream" bourgeois menu thanks to the selfless selfishness of Jeff Bezos or John Mackey? The problem with this temptation is that the Trump spectacle, unlike the triumph-of-the-will stuff put out by the likes of Josef Goebbels, Albert Speer, Leni Riefenstahl, and indeed Hitler himself, always fails ludicrously. When Trumpies put on a boat parade, the boats sink. When Trump tries to give a speech invoking the glories of the American military past, he can't get his parade permits and winds up ranting dementedly about how the Continental Army defeated the RAF by occupying the airports during the Revolution. The flyover and the North-Korean-style military parade don't even come close to being realized. The lawsuits, which might invoke Roland Freisler terrifyingly ranting at victims who are about to experience a death worse than death, are a comic spectacle barely able to be parodied on Saturday Night Live. If the Trump aesthetic is the wedge Trump is using to crack open the shell of resistance in the minds of potential followers, why is it such a joke--and does its reality as a joke mean that Trumpism offers us nothing to fear? Trump is a standup comic whose audience have internalized a self-image so permeated with unmoored irony that it's a wonder they don't all commit suicide. There may be an interior narcissistic spectacle here, but one wonders how creative it really is or how much to the point it is by contrast with Hitler's aesthetic, which was overt, unmistakable, and in certain ways inaccessible to Trump, competent. Perhaps the really sinister stuff is not happening in the aesthetic dimension after all. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4218): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4218 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78761015/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
