President Trump… Its gonna happen A bit of a meme has sprung up recently having some ineffectual fun with the uncanny resemblance of Trump to Biff Tannen the bully from the 80’s hit movie, Back to the Future, its more than the physical resemblance, in the second movie of the series Biff is depicted as a Trump like success who has built a dystopian empire around a building that looks amazingly like Trump Towers..
So in keeping with the occasional predictive bad fortune of the Sci-fi genre (and a nod to JG Ballard’s fiction based on the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency a decade before he event) its probably time for us to pre-mediate the likelihood of a Trump presidency. Continuing the inversion of all the normal rules that his candidacy represents; the more absurd a Trump presidency appears, the more likely it is to happen. Trump requires no coherent arguments as he conforms precisely to Quentin Crisp’s definition of charisma as having -the ability to influence without logic- He is a little like England’s own miniature version (Boris Johnson) in that he deploys an invincible shameless confidence and blather to great effect. This places him not only beyond even the pretence of deliberative liberal discourse but also beyond parody, beyond satire; and perhaps even direct action and protest plays into his hands. To call him a symptom is to frivolous Trump is more like a morbid convulsion.. According to Andre Breton’s credo “beauty will be convulsive or not at all” but imagine a truly visionary convulsion so violent as to repudiate the very concept of beauty itself, substituting all the paraphernalia of aesthetics and connoisseurship… with an object so inexplicable that it appears ( F. Jameson) as a shudder emanating from an incomprehensible future. In art this would make it an avant-garde masterpiece …Unfortunately in this case, the resulting artefact that is the Donald… ----------------------------------------------- d a v i d g a r c i a d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk http://new-tactical-research.co.uk http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
