antitheatricality + politics (the return) - "performative imperialism"

I did say I wasn't going to track this kind of tropery anymore - but couldn't resist reactivating for this beaut of a phrase "performative imperialism", in re. Trump's annexatory theatrics toward Canada, Greenland, Panana, renaming Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America....  

From an Atlantic piece by Jonathan Chait:  

"Since winning a second presidential term, Donald Trump has made a curious pivot to a kind of performative imperialism....  When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario..... [But] we cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.

"An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones....A second reason is that Trump uses his international bullying as fan service for his base. The actual, concrete policy agenda of Trump’s presidency consists largely of boring regulatory and tax favors to wealthy donors and business interests—priorities that most of his voters don’t care about. Trump seems to grasp the need for public dramas to entertain the MAGA base.

"Spectacles of domination play an important role in Trump’s political style. “Build the wall” is the classic example: Trump never did build his “big, beautiful wall” along the length of the southern border, yet his fans don’t hold that against him, because the physical manifestation of a barrier on the southern border was beside the point. They thrilled instead to the idea of a wall as an expression of strength and defiance. When Trump would respond to criticism by saying, “The wall just got 10 feet higher,” he was performing dominance. The real wall was the threats he made along the way."

"There is little evidence that Trump is interested in any kind of practical deal [with Greenland]. He wants to menace allies.... Renaming the Gulf of Mexico isn’t even plausibly related to any economic or territorial objective. It’s pure symbolic bluster."

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So, kind of talk LOUDLY and carry no stick at all?

I am amazed that nowhere in the analysis or commentary on this subject that I've seen has the word  "lebensraum" come up.

My completely uninformed take on Trump's bellicosity

1/ Putin-pleasing push to crack apart NATO

2/ Gets people used to the idea that bigger countries have a "natural" right - in the Hobbesian state of nature that is geopolitics - to dominate or outright absorb adjacent countries.  Which would instill acceptance of Russia's designs on Ukraine and probably the Baltic States, prepare people for US non-pushback to China taking Taiwan...

3/ Part of Trump's late-19th-Century, McKinley cos-play - tariffs, trade wars, protectionism... the Gilded Age and robber barons ... Manifest Destiny (a phrase used in the inauguration speech) and the explicitly imperial expansionism (Hawaii et al) of the USA when it emerged into superpower status, as opposed to the covert imperialism and soft-power manipulations of the post-WW2 era. 

And then of course as others have said, it's a distraction from the coming failure to improve things on a kitchen-table level, the back-tracking from other unrealisable promises. 

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Follow up piece by Chait on shameless rationalizations of Trumpy bluster by former conservative non-interventionist American First type

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And another Atlantic article - this one on Trump's threatening phone call to the Danish PM and the illogic of the unrealisable demands: 

"But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map."

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Talking of "spectacles of domination" as referenced by Chait in the first of the pieces... here's an essay by T.J. Clark in the LRB entitled "A Brief Guide To Trump and the Spectacle".  Clark being a former member of the British chapter of the Situationist International and associate of King Mob - and also, in his later role as head of the Department of Fine Art at Leeds University,  a mentor / influence to Gang of Four, the Mekons et al. So he knows whereof he speaks on the subject of the society of the spectacle. 

I quite liked the anti-trope "marionette theatres of ‘democracy’" but overall didn't get a whole lot out of this essay. Yet another addition to the heaping mound of high-flown eloquence, undereath the floweriness for the most part things we've read before many times on this subject of Trump as dark magus of media, things we've worked out for ourselves or just viscerally grasped. 

This bit is quite interesting - on Trump not being a larger-than-life figure:

But all of these previous technics of persuasion spoke or shone down from a distance. They addressed an audience, they made a totality. Of course, the demagogue pretended to identity with his demos, but the technology did not exist to do the complete lying job. The affix ‘-agogue’ admits as much: the demagogue was still a magician, a mystagogue, a bearer of charisma. And Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size.

Trump, being extremely old, is attached to the old-fashioned pageantry of spectacular power  - rallies,  parades, inaugurations and other ceremonies attendant to high office.  All that Billy Fisher as President of Ambrosia stuff - marching at the head of regiments, addressing rapt crowds in stadiums through tannoy systems. He is famously obsessed with crowd sizes, etc. But he's not any good at oratory, he's a leaden speaker when given a high-flown pre-written speech to read off a teleprompter. Can't summon a grand cadence or soaring climax to save his life. His forte is the rambling inner monologue conducted in public, aka the weave. Which if not as cogent as a tweet certainly seems to have more in common with the driveling rants and quickfire riposte of , message boards, text messages, influencers, social media, blogs even.  That sense of unguarded exposure... "being yourself" but with an audience...  like a webcam YouTuber. A rhetoric-free mode, not anti-theatrical but un-threatrical

The relaxedness of  his appearances on manosphere podcasts and the like is said to have played a role in his reaching young men - see this Kieran Press-Reynolds feature - the candidate just shooting the shit, one of us. Unlike other pols, Trump doesn't have talking-points, he has obsessions and antagonisms that erupt regularly and endlessly as organic leitmotifs... less slogans or catchphrases as mental tics.... the kind of self-image bolstering or anxiety-warding catchphrases, mantras and affirmation that go through anybody's head, except he's doing it aloud, in front of a microphone. Trump doesn't go off script, there is no script - it's unscripted entertainment ("unscripted television" being the genre in which reality TV among other things is classified in the biz). There's no ad libbing because it's all ad libbing. 

So Clark is right insofar as this is not Spectacle 1.0 where there's distance traversed by awe, a superheroic figure on a dais, grand gestures. It's not "all eyes on me", it's more like an abject bleed-through, a ghastly intimacy....  (for his fans) he-is-us-and-we-are-he...  a commingling of id impulses.  

(For sure, throwbacks paint those beyond-kitsch paintings of him as a military leader, muscley fighter/vigilante, saviour etc  But I don't think this is the bulk of his magnetism.  The fantasy is "wish I could be that full of myself, that honest about my prejudices and paranoias, that openly and unashamedly base".

It's a different kind of identification, going far beyond the older ideas of representative politics. 

We're not looking at a show, we're pulled into his show... it's the inner fantasy of Ambrosia leaking out abjectly to cover the entire surface of reality, displacing and supplanting and absorbing it. 

I think this why instinctively a lot of anti-MAGAs people are tuning out, rationing their following of the news, keeping off of Twitter... it's Baudrillardian recalcitrance, an attention-economy boycott, a refusal to be conscripted into the unscripted entertainment.....  perhaps a kind of tonic immobility....

 

tres debonAyers

Some people have compared Kevin Ayers's debonair image to Bryan Ferry - the genuine genteel article as opposed to the faux. Some even see him as a prototype, glam just a little too early

Not sure about that, the music in the first three or four solo albums is nowhere near glam. But I am struck by the use of eye make-up in these Soft Machine appearances

There is another intersection with glam: the theme of decadence, broached by name in this double-edged tribute to Nico, and implicitly in the apocalyptic hedonism of "Song from the Bottom of A Well" - capturing the disillusion / dissolution / dissoluteness of the post-hippy backwash

Watch her out there on display

Dancing in her sleepy way

While all her visions start to play

On the icicles of our decay.

Fading flowers in her hair

She's suffering from wear and tear

She lies in waterfalls of dreams

And never questions what it means.

And all along the desert shore

She wanders further evermore

The only thing that's left to try¡

She says to live I have to die.

She whispers sadly well I might

And holds herself so very tight

Then jumping from an unknown height

She merges with the liquid night.

Lovers wrap her mist in furs

And tell her what she has is hers

But when they take her by the hand

She slips back in the desert sand.

But what she leaves is made of glass

And lovers worship as they pass

Each one says - now she is mine

But all drink solitary wine.

(drink it to Marlene)

This is a song from the bottom of a well

There are things down here
I've got to try and tell;
It's dark and light at the very same time,
The water sometimes seems like wine.

I learned some information way down here
That might fill your heart and soul with fear;
But don't you worry, no don't be afraid
I'm not in the magical mystery trade.

My imagination begins to purr
As things don't happen, they just occur.
Softly crackling electrical smell,
There's something burning at the bottom of this well.

Sitting here alone I just have to laugh
I see all the universe as a comfortable bath;
I drown my body so my mind is free
To indulge in pleasurable fantasies.

There's something strange going on down here
A sickening implosion of mistrust and fear.
A vast corruption that's about to boil
A mixture of greed and the smell of oil.

This is a song from the bottom of a well
I didn't move here, I just fell.
But I'm not complaining, I don't even care
Cause if I'm not here, then it's not there.

Glam can be nutshelled as "illusion and disillusion"....  a reversal, an inside-outing of the Sixties's belief in truth and revolution 

"Oh! Wot A Dream" captures that slide from Sixties inordinate hopes to 70s atomized numbness   - it's an elegiac tribute to friend Syd Barrett but also an entire era. Barrett being the decade's prime casualty, someone who had "too much to dream" 

Oh! you pretty thing - a pop star that should have been but never was....  and in the career slide twilight, he puts out a single titled "Star"

Not to be confused with the earlier much more stellar-sounding 1971 tune that was absurdly thrown away on the B-side of "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes"

"Feel like a million sparkling stars"

More thoughts on our Kev 

anti-theatricality and politics (slight return)

 "Assad's cult is a strategy of domination based on compliance rather than legitimacy. The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them. Assad's cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader ... It produces guidelines for acceptable; it defines and generalizes a specific type of national membership; it occasions the enforcement of obedience; it induces complicity by creating practices in which citizens are themselves "accomplices", upholding the norms constitutive of Assad's domination; it isolates Syrians from one another; and it clutters public space with monotonous slogans and empty gestures, which tire the minds and bodies of producers and consumers alike ... Assad is powerful because his regime can compel people to say the ridiculous and to avow the absurd."

- Lisa Wedeen, "Acting "As If": Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria"

You could substitute another five-letter leader name here and it would work just as well.

Struck me as an interesting way of describing the mechanisms of autocracy. It's like a particular authoritarian mutation of the Spectacle 

The dictator  forces everybody to participate as extras in a giant theatrical production that is the State 

Individual mass spectacles are part of this (as in the North Korean style synchronized stadium pageants)  but at the ultimate degree the spectacle encompasses the entire social field

As a subject, you simultaneously spectate the collective fakery even as you play a bit part in it

It's all for show, but it doesn't work through convincing people that it's true, it works through making people pretend, participate is a mass lie.

Does the dictator believe this pageant of make-believe? Is it the externalisation of his own grandiose inner fantasies,? Like Billy Liar imagining himself the caudillo of Ambrosia - except a dream come true, in this case, as exacted social fact. 

Doesn't matter - the point is the submission to the charade that is enforced and obeyed.

Quentin Crisp - glam theorist

from a 1981 interview with Paul Morley

Interesting comments from Quentin Crisp about music here (similar to Nabokov and Freud's antipathy to music as disequilibrium) which confirms my belief that music in its essence is Dionysian whereas the glam-stylist-dandy impulse is Appollonian.

 

x

Ed directs our attention to this Cherry Red Miniatures compilation track by Quentin Crisp 

More glammish perceptions from Quentin C

“ Charisma is the ability to influence without logic. I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave”

hideous tricks on the brain / the Mael of the species

Morrissey on Fame

Nick Kent:  There's a quote about fame in a play by one of your favourite writers, Heathcote Williams, that it's God's way of punishing people, of marking them out. Can you relate to that?

M: I just think that human life is considered so insignificant now that the only thing one can do, in order to do anything at all, is 'to become famous'. This current obsession with 'fame' runs rife through all the people I know. They have to do it or else their life is absolutely, shambolically useless. And I don't believe that was always the case. I believe that pressures have driven people to this monstrous over-emphasis on fame, on 'doing' and 'being seen'. Not even 'doing' now. You just have to be 'seen' doing something and you're famous. That's strangulating."

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Morrissey on Sparks

"At 14, I want to live with these people, to be - at last! - in the company of creatures of my own species."

pop ventriloquism

 

Amazing how close these Sweetsong demos made by Mike Chapman are to the finished record. (you'll want to skip ahead past the early abject bubblegum pap to the "Wigwam Bam / Little Willie" onwards stompy stuff.)

Particularly on the level of the vocal inflections, the campy ad libs, the whole pitch of hysteria  - almost all of it was worked out in advance.  

Eventually the dummies assimilated the implanted style - so well they could generate their own material and dispense with the ventriloquist  - a kind of self-parody but with the original "self" invented by another

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

Why are we even participating in this piece of BAD political theater There are remedies that could be utilized even before the votes are certified We are WILLINGLY allowing the complete overthrow of our Constitution and our Government And nobody is doing a thing about it

- Rick Taylor

The Biden show was boring. They want the Trump show back. Americans can handle almost anything except boredom.

- Tom Nichols

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.