anti-theatricality + politics (the finale?)

A wise person once said: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” Donald Trump is a clown. Let’s prevent the presidency from becoming his circus.

-  Richie Torres

On the ever darkening bronzer

The more extreme he becomes politically, the more theatrical his public persona must be. The dictator persona is full of obvious artifice: the sunglasses, the macho posturing, etc.

- Ruth Ben-Ghiat

At Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman gets the mea culpa from NBC chief marketing officer producer John Miller about The Apprentice and its role in elevating Trump to world-historical figure

Miller believes that without The Apprentice, Trump would never have been in a position to run for president. “He didn’t have a real company. It was basically a loose collection of LLCs. They’d been bankrupt four times and twice more when we were filming the show. The Apprentice helped him survive that,” Miller told me. “People thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman.”

.... Initially, we leaned into the idea that it was a show from Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor. But when we saw some early takes, we realized Trump was going to be a big character. So we created the title sequence with the theme music of the show, which was For the Love of Money by the O’Jays. We shot the promos with Trump in his limousine, in his helicopter, in his jet, and at Trump Tower. We created the sense of an American royalty. We kept pounding that message over and over again. I called it “ruthless consistency.”

 .... Trump made Mark Burnett rent two floors in the Trump Tower. One of the floors was used to create a false entryway into Trump Tower. So when you came out of the elevator, there was this big fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist. And then another part of that floor was the boardroom that was entirely created to make it look like it was a big, important boardroom. Because Trump’s real boardroom was shabby. You would never think of it as a big-time businessman’s boardroom.

.... When I retired in 2022, I started writing a book called How I Ruined American Culture. 

.... The show aired on Thursday nights and he would often call me on Friday and say, “John, how did we do?” I would just say, “We did very well.” And he would say, “We were the number one show on television!” I’d say, “No, we weren’t but we did very well.” That happened a number of weeks and I kept thinking, Does he just not read the ratings? And I just realized, that’s what he did: He said something he wanted people to believe over and over again, and eventually, it will be true.

 ... We had a wrap party after the third season at Lincoln Center. I was at the bar waiting to get a drink for my wife, and Trump came up to me and said, “John, I’ve got a great idea for season four: Blacks versus whites.”.... I said, “I can understand why you think that’s a great idea because that would be a very noisy idea. Headlines would be everywhere. Everybody would be talking about that, but you make most of your money off of the [product] integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to take part in that, so this is going to hit your pocketbook pretty hard.”

He said, “The ratings would be huge!” 

On 2015 and Trump's entry into the race

I thought, Has there ever been somebody who is less qualified to be president than Trump? And has there ever been anybody that’s more telegenic and understands how to manipulate the media more than Trump?

 ... I do think he would like to be a dictator....   This time.... he’ll hire yes-men and he’ll hire loyal people. And so the government, at best, will function badly, and at worst, he will do his best to make it authoritarian. 

 

Live by showbiz, die by showbiz - a snippet about the Madison Square Garden hate-rally from this  fascinating report by Tim Alberta  at the Atlantic behind the scenes of the chaotic Trump campaign

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous.... who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign. In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It turns out to have been the operative who persuaded Vance to go with the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing: 

Alex Bruesewitz. Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves....   colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

Bonus non-Trump bit

Queen Elizabeth II thought Boris Johnson "better suited to the stage" than politics and two days before her death, after he resigned, she told a senior courtier in jest: "At least that idiot won't be organising my funeral" - Tim Footman

post-11/5 nightmareland update:

"Donald Trump won because he offered a majority of Americans what they wanted: anger and drama

In the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.”

- Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. 

- Joseph O'Neil , New York Review of Books

On the cabinet picks so far

"It’s like he’s releasing the casting list for the final season of America" - Keith Edwards

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on Trump as The 21st Century’s Greatest, Ghastliest Showman - "Donald Trump has made himself a spectacle—and inescapable" - and cites the 1962 book The  Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the more useful things I read while researching Shock and Awe. 

In early 2017, just after Donald Trump took residency in the White House, the New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo engaged in an experiment. He spent a week doing all he could to ignore the new president. He failed. Whether Manjoo was scrolling through social media or news sites, watching sitcoms or sports—even shopping on Amazon—Trump was there, somehow, in his vision. In those early days of his presidency, Trump had already become so ubiquitous that a studious effort to avoid him was doomed. “Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever,” Manjoo observed....

This week, the former president made himself inescapable once more. He will have another four-year term in office, the Trump Show renewed for a second season....

 

Trump is a showman above all, which has proved to be a major source of his omnipresence. He is image all the way down. He is also narrative shed of its connection to grounded truth. He has endeared himself to many Americans by denigrating the allegedly unchecked power of “the media”; the irony is that he is the media.

...  Boorstin pointed to Phineas T. Barnum, the famous peddler of spectacular hoaxes and lustrous lies. Barnum was a 19th-century showman with a 21st-century sense of pageantry; he anticipated how reality could evolve from a truth to be accepted into a show to be produced. Barnum turned entertainment into an omen: He understood how much Americans would be willing to give up for the sake of a good show.

....  Barnum, too, converted his fame as a showman into a second life as a politician. While serving in the Connecticut legislature, he crusaded against contraception and abortion, introducing a law that would become infamous for its repressions of both. 

..... Trump is Barnum’s obvious heir—the ultimate realization of Boorstin’s warnings. The difference, of course, is that Barnum was restricted to brick-and-mortar illusions. The deceptions he created were limited to big tops and traveling shows. Trump’s versions go viral. His humbugs scale, becoming the stuff of mass media in an instant. 

... In the introduction to his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the future president includes a quote from a book about the rich—a classic Trumpian boast doubling as an admission. “Almost all successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world,” it reads, “an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.”

When Trump announced his first presidential candidacy, he staged the whole thing in the gilded atrium of the New York City tower emblazoned with his name, a building that was real-estate investment, brand extension, and TV set. Many, at the time, assumed that Trump was running, essentially, for the ratings—that he might try to channel his campaign into an expansion of his power as an entertainer.

.... In 2015, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, HuffPost announced that it would not report on him as part of its political coverage; instead, it would write about his antics in its Entertainment section. “Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow,” the publication declared. “We won’t take the bait.”

That category confusion explains a lot about Trump’s durability. He defies the old logic that tried to present politics and entertainment as separate phenomena. 

... The effect of attempting to hold Trump accountable, whether in the courts or in the arena of public opinion, has been only to expand the reach of the spectacle—to make him ever more unavoidable, ever more inevitable.

“It’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long,” Manjoo wrote in 2017... 

....Trump once again has carte blanche to impose his vision on the world. And his audience has little choice but to watch.

Some interesting points and some facts I didn't know....

But increasingly it feels like all that could be said and understood about Trump and Trumpism - analytically -  that work had already been done, thoroughly, as far back as 2016. Even before he was elected the first time.

All that eloquence and penetration was for naught - and the endless tsunami of great writing on the subject that continued, wave upon wave, riveting analysis after riveting analysis - all of it ultimately just contributed in its own way to the absolute annexation of consciousness, the attention-economy occupation that was Trump's victory. 

All eyes, all minds, on him.  

The absolute focus, the main-est of main characters.

So as much as I remain still fascinated by the theatrical and anti-theatrical tropes, I think I won't be bothering to read this kind of analysis any more.... 

It doesn't get you anywhere. There are no further insights to be gleaned. 

It doesn't do you any good, it probably does you bad, both in terms of exposure to the toxicity of the personality and the personality cult, and in terms of fooling yourself that it's any kind of way of staying on top of things, keeping ahead of events by keeping abreast of them ... the illusion that knowledge is power, that thinking and analysing is a contribution. 

Just for sanity's sake, I will have to ration the amount of exposure, the bandwidth of awareness, going forward.

Magic Unrealism, or, The President of Ambrosia / the dangers of high self-esteem

Last of the Trump related posts, this one is from midway through his (first?) Presidency:

 

Magic Unrealism, or, The President of Ambrosia

The core of positive thinking - which is also the core of glam - is the power of Desire to override the Reality Principle.

The power of wish-speech (childish, magical, narcissistic) to reject reality as a facts-ist regime.

Hence, Billy Liar's opening line: "Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia"

(Fascism versus Facts-ism - in his fantasyland Ambrosia, Billy is a military hero / benign despot in the caudillo style -  fond of pageantry, parades,  rallies and the like. Beloved by his people). 

Hence, Trump's gainsaying of any element, however small, of consensus reality that is a blow to his own grandiose self-image. 

From the Washington Post:

"Trump plainly views the act of lying, or making things up, or contradicting himself with relentless abandon, as an assertion of power — that is, the power to render reality irrelevant, the power to roll right over constraints normally imposed by expectations of consistency or fealty to basic norms of reasoned, factual inquiry.

As Jacob T. Levy has written, these “demonstrations of power undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.” The whole point of them is to assert the power to say what the truth is, or what the truth should be, even when — or especially when — easily verifiable facts dictate the contrary. The brazenness of Trump’s lying is not a mere byproduct of his desire to mislead. It is absolutely central to the whole project of declaring the power to say what reality is.

Trump’s boast about making stuff up in his meeting with Trudeau comes close to an open admission of this. He lied, or made stuff up, because he could, yes, but also because what one wants to be true actually can be made true."

"Billy Liar - the boy whose imagination is larger than his life"

PR is a form of propaganda  - the StarSelf-as-miniState broadcasting how it would like to be seen by the general public

(cf Trump pretending to be his own publicist, variously known as John Miller and John Barron - later the name of his son, intriguingly - procreation as narcissistic duplication, plus he'd already reused Donald for his first-born

(oh yes he's the Great Pretender.... a pretense of Greatness)

The glam parallel supreme (although there are many - Alice "I love to tell lies" Cooper, Bowie) is Marc Bolan.

From an early draft of S+A:

"Right from the start of his career... Bolan told tall tales, offering journalists grossly inflated accounts of real events and circumstances, while promising that would never be delivered and that in most cases never got beyond being an idle fantasy:   TV cartoon series based around him and scripted by him, screenplays for “three European pictures... including one for Fellini”, several science fiction novels on the verge of UK publication. He boasted of having painted “enough for an exhibition” and having “five books finished which I`ve been sitting on for a long time”. Even on the downward slope of his career, he unfurled fantastical plans for a “new audio-visual art form”.

"Music journalists ate it up because it was good copy.  PR man Keith Altham compared him to Walter Mitty: “he knew that people always wanted something larger-than-life, so he always exaggerated. And sometimes he actually began to believe that himself”. Billy Liar is another parallel. The opening line of Keith Waterhouse’s novel is “Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia”—the latter being Billy Fisher’s fantasy-land, where he rules as a benign dictator/generalissimo.  For Bolan as for Fisher, reality was a facts-ist regime from which he was determined to secede.  Both came from  humble, hard-graft backgrounds (lorry driver father, market stall-holder mum, in Bolan’s Case) amid prosaic, color-depleted surroundings (the East End of London, rather than the imaginary industrial-mercantile Northern town of Stradhoughton in Billy Liar).  Both escaped through make-believe and making things up."

Positive thinking is a form of self-hypnotism, the beaming into the unconscious of "mental photographs", power-poses, heroic self-images, self-actualisation maxims, affirmations etc - a form of internally introjected propaganda. 

In The Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale (Trump's pastor as a young man) advises: "Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture ... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination."

Poz-thinking infected forms of religion (e.g. Joel Osteen's prosperity gospel) (although positive thinking is itself a religion, a perversion of Protestantism) explicitly encourage believers to avoid contact with viewpoints that contradict one's wishful thinking. Osteen sermonises about how one's seed-of-greatness will not flourish in a soil of negativity - it is imperative to surround yourself with positive people (i.e. people who will not discourage you with their more reality-based judgements and lowered expectations, fatalists of every stripe). Similar to the techniques of Scientology, where the organisation encourages / forces the convert to abandon friends and family members who are not down with the positivity program and to instead spend one's entire social life within the belief-reinforcing enclosure  of the community of believers.

Another way of doing this is to constantly reshuffle your cabinet to get rid of realists, people who give any credence to the expertise of the reality-based community. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

bonus beats - a related-to-the-above section from my afterword to Ghosts of My Life:

Where could Mark have gone next, as a listener, writer, thinker? Could Mark have created a new adventure for himself in the later years of his life – intellectually as well as in terms of finding music and pop culture that excited and stimulated him? .... We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he’d lived to pursue its ideas to the finish line. And it’s anyone’s guess how he would have responded to the last six years of authoritarianism, nativism, and outright fascism.

What follows is speculative. I like to imagine he might have written a new book titled Capitalist Unrealism that addresses the paranoid delirium of fantasy and conspiracy that has consumed political life in much of the world. There is an unresolved tension in Mark’s thinking between a faith in the power of the fictive and a hunger for truth.  

From Ccru’s notion of Hyperstition (the self-fulfilling prophesy, the dream that achieves reality through the force of its projection) to glam’s artifice and reinvention of the self, Mark disdained ideas of authenticity and realism and believed in the power of fantasy. Yet Mark also excoriated the bullshit merchants of the mass media, despised Tony Blair as a dark magus of PR, critiqued magical voluntarism and motivational thinking as a form of privatization of hope, and wrote with painful honesty about his own depression, sexual abuse,  financial struggles, and “the wounds of class”.

I feel certain Mark would have been incandescently incensed by the mendacity of Boris Johnson’s Tory government, fascinated but appalled by Trumpism and other excrescences of post-truth anti-politics, and generally aghast at today’s world of influencers, corporate propaganda, psyops, disinformation. The fact that Trump was the first positive-thinking president, with Norman Vincent Peale as the family minister, would not escape his notice. His interest in David Smail’s concept of magical voluntarism might have led him to re-envision capitalism not as the realm of dour realism and deflated expectations, but as a fever dream of hype, irrational exuberance, market mania, and dangerously high self-esteem.  

As the recent cautionary tales of WeWork (retold on TV as WeCrashed) and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (The Drop Out) demonstrate, the scam artist is not an outlier or aberration within capitalism, but simply the extrapolation and amplification of its essence: speculation as wishful thinking, the IPO as image projection and illusion peddling. WeWork is a case study in the demonic glamour of disruptor capitalism, a feel-good enterprise fueled by the founding couple’s mantras and maxims (“manifest your desire,” “misery is a choice”, etc) and their employee rally-call “Thank God it’s Monday” – an uncanny inversion of Mark’s “no more miserable Mondays” in Acid Communism.

So it’s possible that Mark, confronted by a world run amok with the competing delusions and self-heroizing fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition, might come back to an idea of truth and reality as a bedrock. 

His taste took a surprising turn in the last decade. There was his endorsement of Sleaford Mods, whose brand of Happy Shopper realism is really not that far from earlier groups he’d despised like The Streets and Arctic Monkeys. And then there was his unexpected paean to The Jam. In songs like “That’s Entertainment” and “Down in the Tube Station At Midnight” –  sour and dour, chained to the mundane –  “Paul Weller sought to escape his fate in the very act of describing it,” Mark wrote. That could almost be a manifesto for the Free Cinema and the social-realist kitchen-sink movies of the 1960s like Billy Liar and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning -  a movement whose Englishness and everyday greyness almost certainly would have been anathema to the younger Mark, fired up on the visionary darkside aesthetics of cyberpunk and jungle techno. 

The gesture towards truth – to existential authenticity – is there even in the celebration of Joy Division in this book. “Depression is… a theory about the world, about life,” writes Mark, a theory whose foundation is the rock bottom apprehension of futility and emptiness, “the (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.” There is a desolating pride in seeing clearly: “The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.” 

anti-theatricality and politics (McJobsworth / That's Angertainment)

Perhaps no stunt in the history of U.S. politics deserves more ridicule than the grotesquely embarrassing mummery Trump put on at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s today. 

- Seth Abramson (bonus anti-theatricality points for use of the archaic term "mummery")

Donald Trump - a 78-year-old who’s spent his life screwing over workers, who's never earned a real paycheck in his life -  was putting on a show today playing dress-up at McDonald’s to act like he’s one of us. 

Kamala Harris doesn’t have to put on a show. She actually wore the uniform

- Shawn Fain, UAW

So the place wasn’t even open. It was all staged and fake. He didn’t work for real at a McDonalds. It was a staged fraud just like every other event.

- Ron Filipowski

The Trump McDonalds thing was choreographed and staged. The restaurant was closed down, covered in Secret Service, the people going through the drive through were handpicked, careful and intentional camera placement. All staged.

- source unknown

A reminder that the whole Trump McDonald's thing yesterday was fake. Just like him. Store was closed. "Customers" were Trump Cult Members. They had scripts. They had rehearsed. There is NOTHING Trump won't lie about.

- Keith Olberman

So in an effort to highlight his claim that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, Trump pretended to work at a closed McDonald’s where he served pretend orders to supporters pretending to be customers

-  New York magazine

If it weren’t fake it wouldn’t be authentically Trump

- Philip Gourevitch

Donald Trump, born on Easy Street, dreamed of more, insisted. And got it all. Palaces, women, minions, power, supreme fame. Everything...but real pride, or friendship, or love. And at 78 realizes he can’t quite distinguish between a dream and a nightmare…in the Twilight Zone

 - Kurt Andersen

The Yelp reviews:

Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves. Repeated himself several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the showers at the golf club? 

Free lies with every shake. You just don’t want to see who’s shaking. 

I asked for an Arnold Palmer. Old man told me I couldn’t handle it.

“The fries were too salty as if someone who lost a major election had been crying over them for an hour.

The person who was at the drive through vaguely resembled someone who I saw on the news for being a convicted felon.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Job performance versus the job of performance

Biden was been outstanding at the job of being President. Where he fell short was meeting the media's demands for the performative parts of the job, which they value exponentially more b/c they think it's all just a TV show and not real life

- Scarylawyerguy

Neologism of the month

"If you don’t like how things are going in Washington, he’s responsible for it. He’s introduced this type of angertainment where you just get people upset and then you podcast about it and write a book about it and make some money on it"

Colin Allred on Ted Cruz

Kamala CNN Town Hall versus No Show Trump the Final Debate That Wasn't 

"CNN doing theater criticism while the other guy threatens to round up tens of millions of people and sic the military on his domestic foes (including journalists) is surreal to watch. They can't let go of the idea that this is a normal campaign."

- Aaron Rupar

Rally sizes 

Some people will argue that Harris only outdrew Trump because Harris had so many cool special guests at her rally. But that just underscores the point. If Trump were able to attract any cool special guests to his rallies, he’d be doing it. Instead he’s out there limping along almost on his own. He’s the only star of his own show, and it’s not a show that anyone wants to watch anymore.

- Bill Palmer

Waltz Time

 Chap at the Atlantic wakes up to fact that politics is performance and never more so when it is a performance of authenticity (Mark Leibovitch on Tim Walz)

"Tim Walz is trying very hard to make it look like he’s not trying too hard....

"When Harris picked Walz, she knew that this would be an abbreviated race, with limited time to make an impression. The campaign clearly saw Walz as embodying an archetype of American masculinity that would stand in contrast with the noisy grievance guys in the red MAGA hats and creepy venture-capitalist types like Vance, who can’t order a damn doughnut without breaking into hives..... 

"Several people in Walz’s crowds held signs reading coach, a reference to Walz’s former career as an assistant football coach at Mankato West High School before he ran for Congress in 2006. So what if it’s been nearly two decades since Walz has worn a whistle around his neck? The coach thing has been a key component of the regular-guy shtick, one that he does tend to lay on a bit thick....

"In a video that the campaign released last week, Walz can be seen popping his head up from under the hood of the figurative turnip truck in his driveway. The vehicle is in fact his 1979 International Harvester Scout, which has served as a recurring prop in Walz’s stage set—just as Harris has deployed Walz himself as a kind of prop.

"In the ad, Walz is schooling his online audience in the finer points of keeping a dirt-free carburetor. “You can always tell something about somebody’s maintenance by how clean their air filter is,” Walz said, picking up the truck’s filter and then putting it back down again (for the record, his hands are also immaculate). He is like a midwestern version of the Car Talk guys—except that Click and Clack could never pivot as seamlessly as Walz can into a discussion of, say, the evils of Project 2025.

".... Let me pause now to remind everyone that Tim Walz is a politician. He is a former six-term congressman and two-term governor who until recently served as chair of the Democratic Governors’ Association. He can hustle, grandstand, “misspeak,” and be opportunistic, just like the rest of them. When Biden dropped out in July, Walz saw an opening. He seized it.

"... Having a good shtick is part of being a good politician,” Brendan Buck, a Republican communications strategist...

"Walz has benefited from the frenetic pace of contemporary politics: the fact that people tend to experience candidates as impressionistic blurs and pay little attention to anything that lies below the surface. Being able to cultivate a persona and ace a role can get you a long way. Olson said that Walz has unquestionably proved himself a talented political performer throughout his career. But veteran Walz watchers can also grow weary of his practiced yokel act. “Oh, he is totally full of shit,” Olson said of Walz. “And he’s also really good at being full of shit.” Olson seemed to mean this as a compliment.

In a crass sense, being “really good at being full of shit” distills a certain essence of what it means to be a good politician.

.... Oddly, since Harris picked him, Walz has been largely hidden away from the national media. The campaign has been content to deploy Walz as more of a cartoon than a multidimensional character: dress Coach up in camouflage, pop in the Bob Seger eight-track, juice him up on Diet Mountain Dew, and send him onto the stage. His rallies are loud, boisterous, and well attended, usually more so than Vance’s.

"Perhaps this will change after Tuesday. The debate—between two midwestern populists of very different backgrounds, styles, and sensibilities—will be fascinating. Walz can detonate a line with the best, packs a lot of words and umbrage into tight sound bites, and has proved adept on TV. But how will this translate against the cool, cerebral vitriol of Vance? Will Walz’s default nonchalance survive the high stakes of the event?

"What’s clear from watching Walz these past few weeks is that he can land a speech. He is honing his lines as he goes and trying out new ones that he’ll likely reprise against Vance. And he projects a particular relish on the stump when attacking his opposite number.

"... Walz is a winning retail politician, a prodigious hugger who laughs easily and is always passing out little pins imprinted with loons—the Minnesota state bird—to the kids he meets. At every stop, he is endlessly deferential to Harris and careful to portray himself foremost as a servant to her success....  Walz.... carries himself as a charmed political lottery winner, plucked from the prairie.

“Look, I just want to help,” I kept hearing Walz tell people. He cuts a convincing beta figure, content to play the ultimate assistant coach. Minnesota has a proud and winning tradition of vice-presidential candidates: Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s and Walter Mondale in the ’70s. (Both fared less well when they tried to run as alpha nominees, Humphrey losing to Richard Nixon in 1968 and Mondale to Ronald Reagan in 1984.)

"Walz takes the stage to “Small Town,” the rollicking hayseed homage by John Mellencamp, released in 1985. The tune is fun, familiar, and apt for Walz’s rural upbringing in Butte, Nebraska, where he says there were 25 students in his high-school graduating class, 12 of them his cousins.

"But for what it’s worth, every time I hear “Small Town,” I think of a previous Democratic running mate, another self-styled fighter for the little guy with a small-town rap: John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, a two-time presidential candidate, and John Kerry’s running mate in 2004. Edwards was a dazzling political performer in his own right, and he, too, used to wear out “Small Town” at his rallies. The lesson here is that shticks don’t always age well, and neither did the story of Edwards. His sweet-talking country-lawyer routine—righteous champion of justice and handsome family man—would eventually vaporize in a swirl of $400-haircuts, extramarital liaisons, legal woes, a lovechild, and other tabloid unpleasantness.

Yes, Walz, like Edwards, was born in a small town (and he could breathe in a small town). But no, Walz is not John Edwards. He’s much more accomplished and less slick than Edwards ever was. These are very different political times, and just because he and Edwards have the same campaign song doesn’t mean that Tim Walz is also destined to come crumbling down.

"The comparison, however, does ring with a cautionary echo. Very little in politics is truly authentic. And nothing is as simple as it seems—in a small town or on a big stage.

New Puritans

Continuing the Trump-related posts, here's part of a talk I delivered early in 2016 at a conference in Lyon. The talk was titled TOMORROW NEVER KNOWN : LE FUTUR IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA POP CULTURE and as is my frequent wont, the text was way too long to deliver in the allotted time. So I never actually got to read out this final section - perhaps just as well, given its speculative nature. 

NEW PURITANISM

Recently I interviewed the author Chuck Klosterman about his forthcoming  book But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past  - a series of thought experiments trying to imagine what aspects of knowledge today – things we are certain about, in terms of science or what we think is important in culture or the arts – which of these could be completely rejected or thought about in a radically different way, at some point in the near future – 50 years, 100 years, 200 years from now.  He looks at music, literature, sports as well as scientific knowledge like our understanding of gravity.

One thing Klosterman suggests is that whatever we can imagine, is precisely the thing that won’t happen -  because it’s those assumptions, those limits to what we can conceive or that are thinkable for us, all of that is precisely what will disappear. And it’s true that there are plenty of examples of discredited knowledge in history, not just of discredited values or ideology, but actually discredited quasi-scientific belief – the late 18th Century belief that masturbation was the cause of physical and emotional debility – the concept of hysteria – phrenology. 

So right now, we think of the culture heroes of the present as the sexually adventurous, the gender experimenters -- that’s the story of rock - Prince for instance is celebrated in those terms, playing games with gender, inciting us all to free our bodies – and I as a vulture, someone descending on the corpse to write athinkpiece about his career, that’s what I argued – the genius of Prince’s androgyny – but in the back of my mind, even as I wrote it, I was thinking: hmmm. Maybe one day – sooner than we think - all these figures – Mick Jagger, Prince, Madonna or Lady Gaga – they will seem mystifying - That could be because we’ll all live in some kind of trans utopia where the battles of gender will have been won and we’ll be whatever we define ourselves as – man-woman will be a spectrum not a binary.

However it could also be because the whole investment in sexual liberation and sexual expression that is the dominant ideology of our time, that maybe will just be left behind.

Michel Foucault speculated about this in the History of Sexuality, a book I read at the age of 19 and which rearranged my mind, I’ve never covered from the perspectival turnaround -  he wonders whether in the future people will look back on the 20the Century and wonder why we regard sex as the truth of our being, rather than anything else – our minds, our hobbies, our citizenship, our public participation in democracy or whatever.

So I can easily imagine a time when the cultural heroes of the late 20^th and early 21^st Century will the few public figures who are militantly vegetarian or vegan – Morrissey and Prince would be among them, remembered not for Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity and being celibate, or Prince for his polymorphous perversity – but both remembered only as pop stars who were vegan and publicly stood up for that cause. 

Imagine in two hundred years time, there’s a world government, the eating of meat is banned – I know we’re in Lyon, you like to eat animals, every bit of the animal –but a lot can change in two hundred years – so there’s a world government and meat eating is abolished for reasons of ecology, personal health, and for ethical-humanitarian reasons -  only a few hundred thousand livestock still exist on the planet in agricultural museums – there is a black market underground of carnivores, who are prosecuted as perverts – and meanwhile the grand project of the human race is repairing and restoring the biosphere.

Just as we look back to the abolitionists of the 19^th Century as cultural heroes – resisting the obvious evil of slavery – one day our descendants may look back to Morrissey, Prince, Ariana Grande, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto, Ellie Goulding, not for their music or their acting but for being public vegans – abolitionists of the slave trade in animal flesh.  

Paul McCartney will be remembered only as the musician spouse of Linda McCartney. 

But in a larger sense, it could be that the entire rock era with its incitement to self indulgence and excess and living for the now, that will seem not only decadent but  inexplicable -  the cultural values of this future world-society would be equilibrium, continence, restraint, dedication to communal values and duty for the future.  Our era’s popular culture would be seen as antagonistic to those values. Perhaps even criminal, in the biospheric sense.

So if you ask me about the future of popular culture – then what I’m arguing, or at least what I’m playing with as an idea – is that popular culture as we understand it – which is the riotous rebellion of the id against the super-ego – a dark carnival of sexuality, violence, narcissism, vanity, self aggrandizement, poor impulse control, the cult of adolescence as a supreme states of being   - there may be not much of a future for this -  humanity might just grow out of it, it might have to mature out of it.

That’s a thought experiment to play with, have fun with.

But is there any evidence that humanity is suddenly going to get virtuous and self-sacrificing and self-denying?

I don’t necessarily humans will, but I do think there’s evidence for the coming of a new puritanism – my new book Shock and Awe is about glam rock in the 70s and the idea of decadence, and one thing I’ve learned is that pop history goes through cycles of glam and anti-glam – anti-glam phases would be the counterculture, where the values were those of Rousseau – nature, primitivism, childhood, purity, authenticity – then the next anti-glam phase would be punk and postpunk: hedonism distrusted and despised, an emphasis on the didactic, on content over form -  the Eighties are very glam, very narcissistic, image-oriented – and then you have another wave of anti-glam – grunge and to an extent gangsta rap, the values are underground, they’re not to do with looking fabulous or glamorous or being famous.

Right now we have een in the longest glam cycle I can think of - from late 90s rap with its bling aesthetic through the last 15 years of Beyonce, Lady Gaga, it's been nonstop glitz and glamour,  obsession with fame....

I think we are long overdue a switch back to anti-glam, to underground values and a rejection of the idea of music as simply showbiz, simply entertainment.

What evidence do I have for this new puritanism, this suspicion of pleasure and spectacle and glamorous appearance?

I would point not to music or even entertainment but to the huge cult following among young people for Bernie Sanders in the USA and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

First thing that is striking about this development is that these are old men – they’re not young and hip like Obama, or young and slick like Tony Blair and David Cameron when they first came to power  - these are old men who look old – they aren’t telegenic or handsome, they don’t put any effort into appearance or image.

They are wholly lacking charisma as we’ve come to understand as a political necessity

They don’t go in for political theater – statesmanship as stagecraft (pseudo-events, photo ops) -  Sanders and Corbyn are not even that good at oratory or uplifting rhetoric or slogans

Corbyn and Sanders are the opposite of politicians like Cameron or Mitt Romney or Trump, who is an entertainer, a salesman, a huckster.

What Corbyn and Sanders offer isn’t image but pure substance – policy policy policy. Technical solutions.

There is a taste out there, a demand, for politics without theatre, without spin, without optics or any of the bullshit of public relations.

And these candidates’ very ineptness and lack of polish signifies authenticity, their being in touch with the common people, with reality.

I use the term Puritan in reference to the historical phenomenon – the Protestants who disdained theatricality – the paganism and irrationalism of Catholic ceremony – along with worldly, earthly pleasure.

Corbyn is actually a modern day Puritan – he’s famous for his drab clothing, his frugality (he had the lowest expenses claim of any member of parliament, just 13 Euros in one year for a printer ribbon), he has described himself as a parsimonious MP -  he rides a bicycle, grows vegetables, he’s a vegetarian and he doesn’t drink.

Like the original Puritans of the 17^th Century he is anti-royalist, a republican who refuses to  kneel to the Queen..

Corbyn is an anti-dandy, a Roundhead who despises the Cavaliers for their frivolous ways, their vanity. He said this about the House of Commons: "It's not a fashion parade, it's not a gentleman's club, it's not a bankers institute. It's a place where the people are represented."

Like many on the Left he has an unconscious sympathy for radical Islamic critiques of the West as decadent, sexually permissive, narcissistic – the contempt for a culture that produced pornography, cosmetic surgery, reality TV, and so forth.

Now let’s say global warming gets worse, various other ecological crises get worse – I could imagine in the near future a confluence between Sanders and Corbyn style politics – which is anti-capitalist, anti-plutocratic -  I could imagine this populist anticapitalism merging with Green politics into a potent cultural wave. Probably it’s already happening  – but what if it wasn’t just a revolt against the corporations who are destroying the Earth, causing climate change – what if it was a revolt against the culture of that kind of capitalism? Hyper-competitive, disruptive, oriented around winners – around fame, around glamour, around advertising and PR -  this is the definition of popular culture today.

A new resurgent populism that would define pop culture as the culture of uncontrollable greed, irrationality, world-destruction.

It’s not hard to imagine because things like the folk revival in the 50s were based around the same set of ideas. So was anarcho-punk and the more straight-edge, ascetic forms of hardcore punk in the USA.

Adding Green politics to this mix makes it all the more consistent – Green is about zero-growth, which mean consuming less, it means a restraint on hedonism, the cultivation of a balanced and quiet lifestyle,  a stilling of the ego – all these things feed into a new puritanism. You could factor the ideal of purity in here too - organic food sources, locally produced foods – these are all based around the idea of authenticity and a rejection of artifice, the synthetic.

So the cult of health and fitness – young people increasingly giving up drinking for staying fit – could factor into this. In a culture that incites you to impulsive expression of your appetites, constantly tempting you to indulge, what’s needed is discipline and imposition of restrictions on the self - for the survival of the individual self as much as the biosphere.

Another factor that could feed into this new puritanism would be political correctness – the kind of close scrutiny of conduct and speech for infractions of offensiveness, insufficient respect and soundness of value –  a new piety in which conduct and speech held up to very exacting principles.

If this new puritanism became anything like a prominent force in popular culture, a lot of what we think popular culture is about today – freedom, wildness, un-repression – would start to seem like it was regressive. The entire rock era would be suddenly seen as very much on the same side as capitalism – promoting self-ishness, hedonism, impulsiveness, excess, waste, living for the moment, irrationalism and emotionalism. The libertinism of rock and the libertarian capitalist view of the world actually have a far better fit than rock and socialism, or rock and ecology – capitalism wants us to spend, to enjoy, to indulge ourselves.

You could even imagine a revulsion against mediation itself.

-     Again I think of the communitarian aspect to the Sanders and Corbyn phenomenon  - the  huge throngs that Sanders convened in America, the large hall events Corbyn organized, with people unable to get into the hall it’s so crowded, such that he had to have a second speech given for the benefit of the people outside – and this is not someone who is great orator, not a very inspiring speaker really – but that plain spoken, dour list of policies and ideals is what people want to hear, rather than empty uplifting rhetoric.

A A hunger for communitas, for fellowship and collective purpose. 

At At the extreme you could imagine that the pseudo-community and the pseudo-politics of social media would be rejected in  favour of an insistence of physical togetherness in a collective space, face to face politics – the agora of Greek democracy. Politics as a Quaker-style society of friends, meetings without hierarchy. 

Now the final thing in this speculative fantasy of a new Puritanism – which is not something I predict with any great enthusiasm, being a creature of the rock era – but the final aspect is I think that we are overdue a wave of revulsion against the culture of fame – the ideal of worldly glory  as publicity

The original Puritans were virulently opposed to theatre, for a whole bunch of reasons ranging from the very idea of mimesis and actors pretending to be something they were not, to the association of theatre with vice and with the stirring up of emotions, violent passions, 

During Oliver Cromwell’s rule in the mid-17^th Century they actually closed down the theatres. Theatre went underground. There were troupes of actors who perform secretly in the manors and large country houses of the upper class. 

You can hear an echo of this when Corbyn talks about removing the theatre from politics, making it about substance and policy – in a recent Parliamentary debate at which Cameron was making scripted jokes at his expense, Corbyn said “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality” – Cameron who formerly worked in public relations for Carlton TV company in the UK

So that’s a call to leave the seductively irrational elements of politics – image, rhetoric, projection of authority or power using image and gesture - the stuff that Donald Trump excels at, what in old English was called Trumpery – which I believe comes from your French word tromper, to deceive – in English trumpery means empty show, bluster, “practices that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth” 

It’s a call to leave behind illusion and delusion

The Puritans were anti theatre; today they'd be opposed to the entire landscape of modern entertainment --  TV movies pop music – anything involving escape, fantasy, spectacle, and intoxicating depictions of sex and violence. 

It’s not inconceivable to imagine a virulent reaction against the trumpery of pop culture in its totality, what Guy Debord called the Spectacle.

So imagine - perhaps 30 years from now – as various crises deepen, converge, aggravate each other – imagine  the emergence of a modern Savonarola  - Savonarola, the 15^th Century priest who led a movement to renew the Church and purge society of its indulgences – a new Savanorola who possesses a compelling anti-charisma, a contagious and persuasive sense of the corruption of the contemporary world

Imagine the rejected and excluded who follow him rising up and igniting 21^st Century equivalents of Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities

Into the flames go not just mirrors and cosmetics, but selfie sticks and smartphones and unimaginable communication devices yet to be developed, into the flames go breast implants and lip-filler and fake eyelashes and bronzer and every kind of name brand fashion item you can think of

In its place a new modesty, self-restraint, reticence, a dour renunciation of beauty, style and all forms of seeking attention for oneself.

Now this new puritanism won’t be a majority of population – but it doesn’t need to be – history shows that a forceful minority convinced of the righteousness of its own historical project can have a disproportionate influence  on events – look at the Nazis, look at the counterculture, look at the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini who brought down the Shah of Iran despite the relative prosperity and peace of the country at that time.

A new theocracy in which the ‘theo’ element, the god part,  might not be God but might be Gaia or some kind of principle of natural balance or homeostasis – not a new world order but a new ordered world.

For security and stability, the cult of freedom and self-expression itself might be relinquished. 

Rock itself would be an absurd relic, inexplicable, denounced, or just forgotten in embarrassment - a childish thing put away as humanity reaches maturity.  

Trump and Glam

Continuing the short series of pieces about Trump, glam, and fascism written back when he was first seeking election (as opposed to seeking reelection, in 2020). 

This is the director's cut of a Guardian piece from October 14 2016 - eight years ago. 

Glamour, noun – 1. (archaic) visual illusion, a magical haze in the air causing things to appear different from how they really are (as in “cast the glamour”). Etymology: Scottish, variant of Scottish gramayre,  “magic, enchantment, spell”.

 

Trumpery, noun -  1.  worthless nonsense  2/ practices that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value. 3. (archaic) tawdry finery.  Etymology: Middle English (Scots), trumpery -  deceit or fraud;  from Middle French, tromper – to trick, as in trompe l’oeil.

When I was writing my new glam rock history Shock and Awe, I kept running into things that seemed like strange premonitions – eerie previews of the scary and dangerous man running for the American presidency right now.

 In mid-Seventies interviews, David Bowie kept talking - in an unnervingly fixated way -about “a strong leader” destined to “sweep through” the Western World: a charismatic superhero who might possibly emerge not from conventional politics but the entertainment field. Sometimes Bowie’s tone was ominous and fatalistic, as if this scenario was inevitable. At other times, he’d make it seem like a necessary corrective to a Weimar-style state of decadence, talking with seemingly approving anticipation of “a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny” that would clean up the mess made by the permissive society.

 At his most extreme, unguarded and cocaine-addled, Bowie proposed himself as a candidate for the job, whether as British PM, as the “first English president of the United States,” or maybe even as ruler of the world. 

  And Tony Defries, who simultaneously masterminded Bowie’s rise to stardom and promoted his own mogul-in-the-making image. Defries left many of his contemporaries convinced that his ultimate ambitions – and destiny – lay in politics.  One boss of a rival management company confessed that “the only thing that’s worried me about Tony is that one day he might be representing a country in which I happen to live. And I might find myself at war, with no control whatsoever!”

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On the surface, Donald Trump and the glam era’s stars and star-makers couldn’t be further apart. What does Trump have in common with Ziggy Stardust, apart from orange hair?  The Donald is a bigot, a macho bully, a philistine, a proud ignoramus.  Bowie and the brightest of his peers were androgynous aesthetes, intellectually hungry and sexually experimental.

 And yet... there are some unlikely affinities. As signaled by his gilded tower on 5th Avenue, Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and glam likewise share an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention. Trump actually plays “We Are the Champions” by Queen (a band aligned with glam in its early days) at his rallies, because its refrain “no time for losers” crystallises his Social Darwinist worldview.

 A mirror of oligopoly capitalism, pop is a ferociously competitive game that sorts the contestants into a handful of winners and a greater number of losers.  Propelled by a stardom-at-all-costs drive, most of the principal characters in Shock and Awe - Bowie, Marc Bolan Alice Cooper, Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, Bryan Ferry –nimbly reinvented themselves and sometimes trampled people on their way up.  They willed their fantasy-self into existence.  This same imperative of “don’t dream it, be it” (as articulated by Rocky Horror Show’s Frank N. Furter) could be seen in the type of fandom that glam inspired: it had an imitative quality that had never really been seen before in pop, with audiences dressing up like the star. Responding to the sophistication of Roxy Music’s image and artwork, and to sly winking lyrics like “sure to make the cognoscenti think”, the group’s following costumed themselves as members of a make-believe aristocracy. Ferry recalled how some of their North of England followers would turn up to the shows in full black tie as if attending the Academy Awards ceremony. 

Trump’s appeal is generally seen in terms of his doom-laden imagery of a weakened, rudderless America. But there is clearly something else going on: an aspirational and admiring projection towards a swaggering figure who revels in his wealth and entitlement, who’s free to do and say whatever he wants. Trump is a fantasy figure as much as he’s a mouthpiece for resentment and rancor.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of The Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” Describing this “very effective form of promotion”, he and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole.” That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. This was a technique that Tony Defries used to break Bowie in America: travelling everywhere in a limo, surrounded with bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t yet, until the world started to take the illusion for reality.

Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand. As commentators have noticed, banks see him as a promoter not a CEO: the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn’t even own as such, let alone run. He’s an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a “glamour stock”:  an investment that outperform the market based on an inflated belief in its future growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool. Twitter (Trump’s natural habitat) has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money.  Glamour stocks are self-fulfilling prophecies initially:  magic tricks of confidence, they win because everyone believes they’re going to win. They keep on winning right up until they lose, when the gulf between their perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge. 

Self-reinvention was the strategy used by glam stars like Bowie and Bolan. You can see the same chameleonic flexibility at work in Trump’s career. Once upon a time he was a Democrat, on genial terms with the Clintons.  Years ago he used Birtherism as the launch pad for a political career; now he’s dropped it as a political liability. Same with his recent rabble-rousing rhetoric about building a Wall. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer  analyses the agility with which Trump evades attacks by discarding ideas: “He merely creates new Trumps,” just like Bowie conjured up new personas to stay one step ahead of pop’s fickle fluctuations. With no fixed political principles, Trump’s only consistency is salesmanship and  showmanship: the ability to stage his public life as a drama. And it’s the drama that holds the public’s attention – the edgy promise of a less boring politics.  The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with a vote for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”

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Emerging after the earnest, authenticity-obsessed late Sixties, glam was a period in which rock rediscovered a sense of showbiz and spectacle. Pop history has repeatedly cycled through such phases of glam and anti-glam: the Bowie/Roxy era was supplanted by pub rock and punk, which in turn was eclipsed by the glammy New Romantics, while in America hair metal was displaced by grunge. 

Strangely, you can see similar dynamics at play in contemporary politics.  Hilary Clinton sits squarely in the unglam corner: a worthy but dull public servant, supremely accomplished at everything required of a politician and leader except what the public perversely craves: being an entertainer.  Hilary is the American political equivalent of a value stock – those dowdy companies that over time doggedly outperform the glamour stocks, but simply don’t inspire spasms of irrational exuberance in the markets.

The real anti-glam leader of our age, though, is Jeremy Corbyn.  Bearded and low-key, he’s the UK politics equivalent of Whispering Bob Harris: the presenter of the Old Grey Whistle Test, who couldn’t hide his distaste for visually flashy, image-over-substance bands like Roxy Music, Sparks, and New York Dolls. 

Corbyn is viscerally opposed to – and fundamentally incapable of – political theater, the very thing that has carried Trump so close to the White House.  Corbyn even tried to change the format and feel of Prime Minister’s Questions, saying that he wished to “remove the theatre from politics”. In one particular PMQ, Corbyn responded to Cameron’s slick pre-scripted gags with the schoolmasterly reprimand “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality.”  

Oratory is not his strong suit: he seems instinctively averse to all those elements of spoken language - cadence, musicality of utterance, metaphor – that sway the listener by bypassing the faculty of reasoned judgement. But as Gary Younge argued recently, Corbyn’s plain-spoken delivery is taken as a token of sincerity by his following, who “have not come to be entertained; they have come.... to have a basic sense of decency reflected back to them through their politics.”

This is how a personality cult has built up around Corbyn, despite his honest and accurate admission that "I'm not a personality.”  It’s very indie, very alt-rock, the way that the absence of charisma has become the source of a curious magnetism. And of course it’s also Corbyn’s principled consistency over the long haul that seals the deal: an unyielding integrity that makes him closer to a Neil Young than a Bowie.  

While the classically elegant Bryan Ferry fraternizes with the nobility and admits to having conservative views, Brian Eno – who abandoned the glam image soon after leaving Roxy for casual, artist-in-the-studio wear – can now be found penning columns arguing “Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister? Why not?”. But as with a taste for indie’s lack of showy drama, it takes a refined sensibility to see past the surface appearance. The general public want a leader to look like a leader. The performance of a public image is considered as important as the actual job performance.

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Once in a blue moon, a politician comes along who combines pop star allure and all the less glamorous qualifications like knowledge and temperament. Obama has both kinds of cool going for him: perfect comic timing at the White House Correspondents Dinner, calmness and clarity during moments of Oval Office crisis. Politics without charisma is certainly a dry affair. But the cult of personality can be dangerous outside the realm of showbiz. 

“I could see how easy it was to get a whole rally thing going,” Bowie said in 1974, recalling the height of Ziggy mania in Britain a few years earlier. “There were times when I could have told the audience to do anything.” In another interview of that era, Bowie spoke with seeming admiration for the way Hitler “staged a country”, combining “politics and theatrics” to create the ultimate spectacle. “Boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience...  [Hitler] created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like.” 

Fingers crossed, the Trump show gets cancelled next month.

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If you consult your copies of K-Punk, the posthumous Mark Fisher anthology, and turn to page 617, you will find "Mannequin Challenge" - the last piece Mark ever wrote, an unfinished essay from October 2016  - it just stops short mid sentence. It's about the Trump campaign versus the Clinton campaign, the libidinal deficit of the latter compared to the former, and in part the essay picks up from this piece I did for my The Guardian. To the end me and Mark were passing the baton back and forth - albeit more sporadically than the blog heyday. 

Elected! Rejected?

 

first in a series of posts related to the last time Trump ran for election (rather than for reelection)

Article for MTV.com, 2016, On Alice Cooper's "run" for President in 1972.

Forty-four years ago, Alice Cooper ran for President.

Okay, not really – but the singer and his group did release the single “Elected” in September 1972, timed for the final stretch of the Nixon versus McGovern race for the White House.  A bombastic blast of proto-punk fury, “Elected” proposed Cooper as the leader of “a new party, a third party, a WILD party” that would “take the country by storm”. The single was accompanied with an uproarious promo video, in which Cooper drives around in a Rolls-Royce glad-handing the voters and revels in the barrow full of donor cash wheeled in by his campaign manager,  a roller-skating chimpanzee.

The idea for “Elected” actually dated back to the previous Presidential contest in 1968, which inspired Alice Cooper to write a song titled “You Shall Be Elected”. That lyrical concept fell by the wayside but the tune survived as “Reflected”, a track on the group’s 1969 debut album Pretties For You. Flash forward to ’72 and Alice Cooper were now the most infamous band in America, thanks to their shock-rock concerts involving the dismemberment of baby-dolls and faked but hair-raisingly realistic executions of the singer by gallows and guillotine. Following the chart success of “School’s Out,” the group were on the brink of the superstardom they’d been chasing for four grueling years.  So they decided to jump on the election-year bandwagon and drastically remodeled “Reflected” with the original lyric restored and intensified. Instead of “You Shall Be Elected”, the hook line became “I wanna be elected”: a messianic power trip for a singer who justifiably saw himself as a leader of youth.  

Bob Ezrin, the group’s producer, came up with a shrewd ruse to generate the declamatory demagogue vocal that “Elected” needed. “To get the performance I had a full-length mirror placed in front of Alice on an angle,” Ezrin told an interviewer. “That way he could see his entire body in reflection.” Gesticulating like an orator, Cooper rasped out lines about how the “kids want a savior, don’t want a fake” and vowed that very soon “we’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make.” Ezrin added horns suggestive of statesman-like pomp and distorted bursts of TV newscaster voice-over in the style of Walter Winchell. After $10,000 of studio time and eighty hours of obsessive mixing, the result was one of the hard rock classics of the first half of the Seventies.

From its whiplash opening riff through Cooper’s abyss-plunging scream to the portentous descending bassline in the outro, “Elected” can also stake a claim to be punk rock four years ahead of historical schedule. The tone of apocalyptic glee mingled with megalomania anticipates “Anarchy in the U.K.” (Johnny Rotten was a huge Alice fan and his audition for the Sex Pistols involved miming to “I’m Eighteen” on a jukebox). There’s a lyrical preview of punk too: during the fade, Cooper reels off a list of U.S. cities that have “problems,” then whispers “and personally... I don’t care” – a glimpse ahead to the taunting nihilism of “and we don’t care” in “Pretty Vacant.”

Listening to “Elected” recently while working on my new glam rock history Shock and Awe, I heard another element of prophecy:  Cooper’s drunk-with-the-promise-of-power performance reminded me of nobody so much as Donald Trump. Like Cooper, Trump is an entertainer moving into politics, using showbiz techniques that bypass reasoned analysis and policy proposals and instead conjure a baseless aura of authority. When Cooper rants about how “you and me together / young and strong,” it sounds like Trump’s blasts of hot-air about America being great again, how “we’ll win so much”. There’s Trump Tower-like bling too when Cooper brags about being “a dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce”.

Long before Trump ever featured in its pages, Alice Cooper made the front cover of Forbes. In the financial magazine’s April 15^th 1973 issue, the band were held up as exemplars of “a new breed of tycoon” that had emerged thanks to the Seventies rock business’s bonanza of platinum albums and mega-grossing tours.  Beneath the headline “the rockers are rolling in it”, an interview with Cooper saw the singer describe himself as a true patriot: “I’m the most American rock act. I have American ideals. I love money!”  In another interview - with Bob Greene, a political journalist who followed his Nixon/McGovern campaign chronicle Running with a book documenting an Alice Cooper tour– the singer talked about his success in Trump-like terms as the result of a pure will to dominance: “It was nothing but positive thinking. I’m very competitive....  That’s my main life drive – being better than everyone else.”

 “Elected” was the taster for Billion Dollar Babies, the 1973 album that propelled Alice Cooper to mainstream megafame.  A brazen celebration of money-making, the album stomped on the last vestiges of hippie idealism still lingering on from the Sixties: instead of sticking it to the Man, why not become the Man?  Billion Dollar Babies’s packaging was styled as a snakeskin wallet bulging with cash; inside, fans found a facsimile of a billion dollar bill. The accompanying tour was the most spectacular and lucrative (raking in a then astronomical $4,000,000 for 64 concerts) that rock had yet seen. The group travelled between cities in a private jet with a dollar symbol on the plane’s tail.

In interviews Cooper described the album and the show as a celebration of decadence – then an in-vogue concept  because of the movie Cabaret. “It’s happening in the States now, all that German thing of the Thirties,” Cooper told Circus magazine’s Steve Demorest. “There is so much money in the U.S., and everyone has as much sex as they want. All we’re doing is reflecting it. I like the idea of the American Seventies producing a cabaret of over-opulence.... I’m a nationalist. I know the States is the best place in the world to live in.” Indeed Billion Dollar Babies concerts ended with the band unfurling the Stars and Stripes to the sound of “God Bless America”.

Dismayed pundits at the time took the commercial success of Alice Cooper’s sick-humor and cynical worldview as proof that the assumed link between rock and progressive politics had proved illusory. All those benefit concerts for McGovern played by rock bands had done nothing to forestall a landslide reelection for Nixon, self-proclaimed champion of the silent majority. Some critics outright identified Alice Cooper as Nixonian rock.  In truth, the singer had not even voted in ’72 – something he professed to feel ashamed about. But Cooper did say that “I wouldn’t have voted for McGovern”, mainly because the candidate was too wishy-washy and changed his mind so often. 

Generally, Cooper professed to find politics “so boring”, quipping that “if elected, I would impeach myself”. But while the finale to the Billion Dollar Babies concerts involved a Nixon lookalike bounding onstage only to be roughed up and bundled off by the band, in interviews Cooper expressed sympathy for the President,   embroiled in the Watergate scandal shortly after his reelection triumph. “I think Nixon’s got a rough job,” Cooper told Greene. “And if he’s guilty of anything, I don’t think it’s anything new. He’s just the first one to get caught. I think Nixon’s a star... He’ll go down as one of the biggest personalities ever to come out of the United States, just by being so notorious.... I would love to spend some time with him. I’d probably sit down and talk about golf.” That never happened but Cooper did get to play golf alongside Nixon’s VP and successor Gerald Ford in a celebrity tournament. In further bizarreness, one of the singer’s four homes was right next door to the Phoenix, Arizona residence of Barry Goldwater, hero of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and a failed Presidential candidate in his own right.   

Like the acting profession, rock has continued to lean left and liberal for the most part.  But the existence of right-wing rockers – Ted Nugent, Johnny Ramone, Kid Rock, Gene Simmons, Avenged Sevenfold, and Alice Cooper himself, who’s been described as a “quiet” supporter of George W. Bush but whose intentions in 2016 are undeclared– shows that there is no innate and irrevocable link between rock  and progressive politics. Indeed rock’s combination of populism and individualism arguably inclines more logically with a libertarian agenda than with socialism. 

When you look at the “rock star” version of rock - the model for misbehavior and excess that’s recently been so influential in rap – it becomes obvious that it has far more in common with Trump’s worldview than, say, Portlandia values.  “Rock star” rock runs on ideological-emotional fuel like vanity, wasteful splendor, and alpha-male display. There’s a reason why Trump soundtracks his stadium-concert-like rallies with songs like “We Are the Champions” and “I Won’t Back Down”, and why he could plausibly  add “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” to the playlist too.  Magical thinking, vacuous self-aggrandizement, an appeal to gut feeling and irrational uplift, us-versus-them postures: if not the rock candidate, Trump is at least the hair metal candidate.

Although a Top 5 smash in the U.K., “Elected” did not repeat the success of “School’s Out” in America, stalling at Number 26. Let’s hope this is an augury for November.