Some months back in the thick of the Republican primaries, I was sitting at a shabbas meal and Trump had in spite of ourselves (the spite is real) become the unavoidable topic of discussion. The words Nazi and Fascist were being tossed around, but I wasn't buying. I managed instead to shock the room into silence when I said it was bad enough that he was just a demagogue, because “Demagogues are the abusive boyfriends of politics.”
Just to make myself clear, I think the discourse on the Trump phenomenon regarding economic anxiety, racial anxiety, internalized misogyny, that's all essential. I'm looking to contribute another angle, one that considers to what end Trump manipulates. The problem isn't whether or not you disagree with him so much as whether you defy the rule that he makes the rules. His facts are true, so those reporting otherwise malicious liars to be denounced and attacked until they finally capitulate. Until the press gets in line he will continue to baffle them by somehow demanding to control their coverage. It doesn't matter how little sense that makes. It also doesn't matter if he actually understands why what he's asking is outlandish and bizarre to even imagine possible. He'll keep it up until he succeeds in warping our expectations and perceptions of what is or isn't normal, until his reality becomes the one we freely endorse and accept. Until that day comes he won't ever stop lashing out.
So Trump earns a reputation for attacking ruthlessly and relentlessly, but that's far from his only tactic. With a certain rhythm and feel he'll toss out the unexpected complement to an unexpected beneficiary. When it happens we're suddenly relieved and a little shocked; by mercy and graciousness on his terms--not even terms that might be confused with rational ones, but ones entirely his alone--we're freely spared from more ugliness. And of course these unmpredictable moments of generosity immediately precede his most vicious attacks. As soon as we feel gratitude for a brief kindness the moment passes, and he'll pick his target and decalre they shoul be shot in the face in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
The result is that Donald Trump can point at the camera, declare to the country he'll accept the election results if he wins, and people will still say it's just rhetoric, tactics, a persona, some part of himself he's bound to shed soon. Once the primaries thin out. Once the convention comes and goes. It's noteworthy that while after his run-in with the Khan family the mainstream media voices stopped talking about the “Trump pivot,” people continued to make the same excuses that he'd change. I still hear people saying--after he's already taken the oath of office--that the serious Trump will emerge eventually. That's isn't how this pattern plays out, though.
Some of the literature out there on the Trump phenomenon discusses personality and preferred types of authority. I think it makes sense that if you find a brand of authority compelling, the kind of leadership Trump exemplifies speaks to your desires, and that would make it something you'd inherently trust. But the impossible question never asked in these articles is not just how certain sociological types were appealed to, but how the remainder of the population were manipulated, implicated, made to inflict, suffer, and simply allow terrible things to happen without protest.
It's been said by some that ridicule doesn't work on a demagogue, that it just directs more attention to them which they can manipulate and control. The demagogue then seems even more invincible, even more incapable of ever losing face. The lesson of an abusive boyfriend, or of any abusive figure, is that all of us have the capacity to become victims more than we know or will ever admit, and that all of us are just as capable of holding onto ourselves, maintaining clarity, and breaking the cycle.
Nerdwriter's one of those cultural commenters who annoys me most when I agree with him. That is until this. I hate everything about it, but somehow I've reached peak levels of contempt for it too. Look at it. LOOK! It's another over-produced, over-branded, self-appointed thought-leader, masquerading his uninspired spin on the most pedestrian of socio-political observations like it makes him the next intellectual Jesus. Isn't it amazing how Trump exposes politicians and the media, he says? Isn't it amazing how he makes a Donald Trump video without referencing how Trump supporters have said those exact same words thousands of times over? How many times has this brilliant insight poped up on his Facebook feed before it became his idea, and how many people said the same thing afterwards? Even Trump supporters have stopped repeating the line of how he's exposing politicians and the media, and they're ditto-heads. We should be grateful to the Donald for this, he tells us, kind of like how we should be grateful for a "market correction" as being ultimately a good thing for the system. But why stop there? We should be grateful to all dictators for showing how venal and hypocritical we are. They're really great for Democracy. Twat.
Credit where it's due: that one-to-one correspondence between media coverage and polling is something I hadn't seen before.
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So, I got issues with this Vox piece that has a lot going for it, except that the author loses himself a little in his own invective. He's so eager to criticize his side for being smug, self-assured, and insulting that he forgets the other side does the exact same thing--in their own way. The real awareness he's demanding should be how all of us are constantly signalling our belonging to ideological (and social) groups, inherently superior to the other. As if the Republicans don't have their series of codes to identify you as getting it, as being in the know? Like we're the only ones with the problem of confusing our ideological currency, which we pass around like tokens, with real knowledge of real political and social issues? If we're going to reach anyone, we have to become more aware of these cultural aspects to political signalling. What are Republicans trying to convey to each other? How are they reassuring each other and of what? I mean past the simplistic binary issues of gun rights and abortion and more the question of what generally appeals to them. I'll submit the author's not interested in their political culture and their signals because he thinks only Democrats should be held to higher standards. I mean, hasn't all political rhetoric for years now basically said we're embarrassingly right and you're hilariously wrong? I don't even understand his repeated attack on Jon Stewart; all I could assume was that he was more criticizing the Daily Show's fan base than anything else. If we're being classist, then go for the jugular, man, and call us on our classism. If we're lazy, self-flattering dilletente-ideologues, then call that in so many words, but don't make it about how shallow and horrible the rest of us are. Seeing our political discourse as social communication, which is so often invisible to ourselves and the other side alike, is way too important for us to get wrong because the only thing worse than smug is meta-smug.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just better at tuning out voices that I don't think are productive. Maybe I'm the apex smugster. Or maybe my real point is that this is too little, too late.
Donald Trump is a race-baiting demagogue, and the enthusiastic base flocking to him aren't just disaffected, dispossessed blue-collar families. They aren't all politically disenchanted people looking for a personality not part of the system in a good way. A major part of Trump's support is exactly as racist as we think it is. Our story as a country isn't just about the poor masses looking for dignity and empowerment but about a people who had to learn to reject notions of racial superiority. The electrifying effect that Trump's announcement for candidacy had on the white supremacist movement is documented and real. For decades they've been effectively exiled from the field of pubic discourse--both the real white supremacists and those with latent racist notions that they've kept to themselves. Ever since Trump picked up that dog whistle and puffed out those spay-tanned jowls for his precious political life, they all, for the first time in memory, felt a little validated, by someone actually in mainstream political discourse. Isn't that nice?
I don't care if a plank in the Trump platform was a cure for all known diseases. No one who race-baits as shamelessly as he does should be allowed to succeed in this country's politics! And now--now that we have something real to protest--that's when Emmet Rensin lets rip this rant he's been holding in for years? Now's when he gloats about how superior and asinine the rest of us were? Sure, a lot of this could have been refreshing, but, sir, I hope you do forgive my unfazed ambivalence.
I just watched The Hateful Eight. Talking about Tarantino movies gets awkward. It's not until I’m already in the middle of the conversation that I can tell if I’ve just stepped in it with one of those cinephiles who insist Tarantino’s stolen every good idea he’s had. Really I think what they’re upset about is how we all miss Tarantino’s filmic references, and tend to imagine that he’s made this stuff up on his own. I have no idea where Tarantino gets his cinematic ideas from, but I know that he does, and that he steals better than anyone else I know could. Before I can articulate this or anything else as diplomatically as I can, it’s already too late. The conversation’s been shut down without warning, and the more my mouth flaps in the wind, the deeper I sink into the mud. And that's mild compared to the same encounter with a passionate Feminist stridently protesting Tarantino and his work. Every feminist criticism of Tarantino is legitimate and necessary, but talking out the merits and faults of a film now puts you in the position of apologizing for misogyny and violence against women. The more subtle the nuance the more egregious the mansplanation. For all that, for its own special reasons, Hateful Eight is the most awkward Tarantino movie of all for me to talk about—maybe even more than Deathproof. I really just don’t want to.
But I’m gonna, mainly because I just can't uproot the distrust I have of anyone telling me not to read or watch anything. I will as a thinking person identify a thing for whatever it is, and that is just what I mean to do here. If all Tarantino's films have themes of vengeance and hatred then Hateful Eight is the most Tarantino film of them all. For those who haven’t seen it I’ll underscore that point: The Hateful Eight is more about vengeance and hatred than any other Tarantino film before it. It was more difficult for me to sit through this film than all the others. And, for a year that’s sucked as much as 2015 did, that perplexing hatred, white-hot and venomous enough to burn you out watching it inexorably unfold, violent enough to amount to total nihilism, Hateful Eight is surely the movie of the year. 2015, when the world turned against ISIS and they kept going strong. That makes 2015 the year of genocide, slave markets, and societal rape of women and girls. It was the year when certain people insisted on watching perverse propaganda snuff films with a sense of righteousness, so that they could claim to know evil better. Better than who, I wonder? 2015 was when young reserved religious men found something in ISIS’s doctrine that sex with enslaved women and girls was sanctioned by God and beautiful. At that same time, it was also the year of smug polemicists with their clash of civilizations rhetoric (Don’t blame ISIS completely for this one guys!). To some, Islam was just revealing its true face. To others, it was all just an example of how their values weren’t like ours. Still others sharpened their rhetoric to a finer point in discussing the inherently political nature of a religion observed by probably over a fifth of the world now. All this amounts to its own nihilism, astonishingly, inexplicably in the name of values.
Every election cycles dumbs down the national rhetoric each time another one come around, but 2015 was something special. Sure, back when they were pushing through the Affordable Care Act people were shouting Nazi and Hitler throughout this magnificent country and declaring that it was time to water the Tree of Liberty. But when candidates for the highest office in the land talk in the stupidest, most bigoted language with a kind of competitive brinksmanship, something new is happening. And let's move on from the Middle East and the accompanying xenophobic coded messages, because from our comfortable movie seats, that's easy for us to do anyways. 2015 was a time of police brutality, race riots, racist mass shootings, terrorist mass attacks, and home-grown terrorist mass shootings. It was a time when panicked police forces killed unarmed civilians, children sometimes, and were ardently defended by people using the most transparent racist rhetoric. It was also a time when the same people who were comfortable doing nothing to avert a geopolitical catastrophe then openly questioned the Geneva Convention's stipulations about refugees, interrogated those refugees as if insisting on their being perfect victims only, idly asking why can’t those people be responsible and deal with their own? Why is it our responsibility to save another person? Guys, I loved Hamilton, Fun Home, and Malala as much as the next person, but they didn't shape the dominant narrative for this year.
So watching a display of racism and recrimination, violence to women, blood feuds, and so much gore and torture that I can't unsee it or describe it without spoilers (feel that FOMO yet?) is the last thing I want to defend, or discuss, or think about. I don’t want this conversation at all. I think I'm having it mainly because it's burnt its image into my mental retnas, and especially because this film, final scene and all, was an abstract and brief chronicle of the times. And that's the part I bitterly detest more than anything else.
Odds are better than not that if you've ever seen a text like this one previously, you'd never mistake it for something other than what it is. It's a midrash, and this one happens to be a favorite for me.( Read more...Collapse )
Is there a word for the class-oriented version of mansplaining? I feel bad posting a vid like this when there are so many good pieces of Modern Orthodox satire that, I'll say it, restore my hope in our community. I kinda mean that. Sure they to provide only smallest increments of hope, but I'm not gonna deny the feeling. They prove an ability to laugh and the presence of self-awareness. They seem to celebrate and critique at the same time, and the best of them don't compromise on either. And instead of linking any of the entertainment and satisfaction I've enjoyed these past several years from good vids, I post this messed up piece of work. Arguably what we find here is nothing more than a classic town-versus-gown problem. Me, I can't help but think of how class-based values and religious values intertwine, sublimation hard at work in the process, confusing an already tangled mess of moral thinking. Uptown Funk is supposed to be an anthem. It's not the Sugarhill Gang or Michael Jackson or Prince but it references superficial aspects of them to celebrate their celebration of an inner city world filled with life and color. And then comes this bunch of middle-class religious boys dressed up ghetto-eighties style, joking about getting mugged, and favorably concluding with "Hey, you know this neighborhood you call home? It's actually not bad. Nope. How suprising! It's really not that bad!" The MO humor is actually pretty funny, but the arrogance that goes with the territory, its patronizing qualities and cluelessness to boot--especially how they keep going full-speed ahead, remaining so utterly self-assured--it embarrasses me, really.
I do find it incredible that as many people were involved in this project as there had to be, not one thought to autotune that guy's voice to keep it in key. And if that were the only problem, I'd totally live with it.
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The petition for Shalom Rubashkin is second in popularity to legalizing weed. Combine all petitions about decriminalizing cannabis in some way or another and it doesn't come close. It ranks higher than abolishing puppy mills or reinstating Glass-Steagall, or putting an end to the Patriot Act, corporate personhood, and the TSA. So what the hell is the point of a movement like Occupy Wall Street if it's so clear nobody in this country knows what they want?
This vid is so rantworthy I couldn't think straight if I got started.
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