This guy? Who knows how he understands his schtick. He thinks it has a niche, but he's a bottom-dweller. Everyone in his line gets by on some mix of believing and performing their own bullshit.
Going on 40 years I've been thinking satire is dead, life overtakes it. A lot of people say this.
I saw the Westboro Church "GOD HATES FAGS" protest near Ground Zero on 9/11/2004, and I'd never heard of them, and the sight from afar was already so absurd I persuaded myself it was a local gay theater troupe mocking Christianists from Kansas. We got nearer, absorbing the scene. They looked like several families with children, in worn rainbow-hippie outfits. Reaching the public's side of the police barricade, still struggling with denial, I asked one of them: Is this a joke? Are you doing a performance? He pointed at me like the judge on judgment day, and turned to scream to the rest: "Here's a jackass who's never read a word of scripture!" Yep, actual Christianists from Kansas.
Or were they?! I mean, given why I was at Ground Zero on 9/11/2004, how could I not further come to wonder: Were they cooked up in a psyops lab?
Fast forward through 16 years of RI history, as it were.
More recently it's been occurring to me this should be more than a sigh, or a joke, or a means of coping. If it keeps happening, there's a logic to it.
Sometimes the joke is framed in a flipped, more prophetic version: effective satire turns into a plan for imposing the visions it opposed. How many people, considering the state surveillance and propaganda complex, have remarked that
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manifesto? Dr. Strangelove dissects the superpower drive to nuclear war with more understanding of its underlying social psychology than anything from the RAND Corporation. It's brutal and simplistic, but analytic and precise. Does it also serve to defuse horror, indirectly make nuclear war more likely? It's in the title, isn't it? "How I Learned to Love the Bomb."
Apropos, how often have I thought that Wall Street players, Davos-Trilateralist planners, FT writers, and corporate rationalization consultants are the Reverse Bolshevik elite, the groups who, at least after 1917, have been the most persistent and professional in the real-world application of the Marxian theory of capitalism?
Self-parody seems to work as a strategy for winning ends more extreme than one initially intended, or could have rationally hoped for. Not always, not for everyone. Talents, contexts and outcomes vary. There are limits, there are ceilings. Alex Jones doesn't get to be Caudillo el Supremo. It can occur on small scales, like with the "careers" of the #Russiagate twitter-warriors, or on national and global scales, with the omnipresence of car-insurance advertising. Trump is far from the first example of actors becoming president, or clowns who performed TV versions of dictators actually being taken seriously and winning office. Berlusconi preceded him, Zelensky has followed. There are dozens. This has a history. To some extent, Mussolini and Hitler were themselves examples of men "who played Mussolini or Hitler on TV" (in their cases in texts, on radio, and at rallies) before they became the fulfilled monstrosities of their tenures in power. Doubtless you can go back through millennia of political rhetoric, theater, and marketing, looking for cases to frame as examples of this.
I haven't systematized examples of the thought, but I guess it has happened a lot, and according to a few rough principles that can be divined and dissected. Some first thoughts: An ad-absurdum but winking performance of one's self short-circuits a skeptic's defenses and allows entry to hearts and minds in situations where you might have expected a "serious" fascist, someone more dedicated and fervent and genuine in their faith. Maybe this is why Trump's the god-president of the Christianists, and the actual Christianist is his side-kick? But it's also happened in reverse, right? It's not the killer formula for all situations. Sometimes the base wants the real thing. Or they get a taste from the clown in preparation for the firebreathing destroyer (who could also be the same one).
Has anyone put together a proper set of terms for this? There should be a theory for it, synthesized from elements like kayfabe, bread and circuses, the Overton window, old conservative thinkers' essays about thow much they hate crowds and demagogues, Butler's naive ideas on drag as resistance, social psychology of charisma and bureaucracy, etc.
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