Vibes v Guns: Leonard Cohen and the Enemy Within
‘Almost everyone has drank the Cool-Aid at this point, it will be very hard to repair minds ex post facto. Memetics is a hell of a drug.’ – John Ash
We’ve reached the “Trump’s not for Hitler” stage of the electoral cycle. That’s where the bar is now. His sexual offences have been captured and commented over and over. John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said Trump met the definition of a fascist and would try to govern like a dictator if elected. He has been filmed mocking the handicapped, demeaning US prisoners of war, boasting about sexually assaulting women, praising Vladimir Putin, and urging a violent attack on the US Capitol.
Nothing matters.
He is less geriatric than sociopathic, argues Ezra Klein…
Trump has been reduced to McDonald’s stunts and talking about Arnold Palmer’s dick between threatening to imprison his political opponents and media critics, and talking of the ‘Enemy Within’ – channeling Maggie Thatcher and Joe McCarthy and doubling-down on his ‘they’re eating the dogs’ themes. He has said he wants to cleanse America of “scum” and “vermin”, including refugees, immigrants, and Democratic officials.
He is half Travis Bickle and half Arthur Fleck.
It’s going well.
(Almost) incredibly it’s neck and neck. Wildly partisan polls seem to oscillate between a ‘landslide for Harris’ and a ‘landslide for Trump’. Party-loyal courtisans attempt to shape the discourse by either casting dire warnings about Trump as an ‘existential threat’ or Kamala Harris as a socialist fire-brand. ‘Communism is coming’ warns MAGA, ‘Fascism is coming’ warn the Democrats.
Two weeks to go and, apparently, it’s too close to call as Trump has degenerated further into a grim diatribe of memetic gibberish. He was captured swaying to Leonard Cohen* and other hits from his stage show playlist for a good twenty minutes as if Ivanka had flipped her dads Spotify to random. As Klein observes though this is not a descent into dementia. Trump is not demented in that sense, but he ‘suffers’ from complete disinhibition – he literally doesn’t care about anything. This, then is the explanation given by some commentators – Trump is somehow speaking for the disenfranchised and bewildered white man surrounded by so much PC woke ‘rules’. He cuts through by his ability to break the rules and be completely honest.
To be clear, this commentary is lazy garbage.
Trump has been let off the hook by a pathetic Kamala Harris campaign, which is almost completely void of any content. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it in ‘Beyond the Ballot: The Left in a Time of Polycrisis’ – the Democrats chose to look at the situation in the world, in Gaza and the Lebanon, and choose as their theme for the election ‘Joy’.
Harris has done the equivalent of swaying to Leonard Cohen in a cheesy celebrity-led campaign profiling the Cheney’s and attempting to siphon-off the supposedly sane wing of the former Republican Party, building strange coalitions across bipartisan politics rather than building an alternative. In this, she is both slave to Biden’s record and incapable of finding her own feet. She would have been better to build a real alternative because Trump’s team will frame her as a dangerous communist dictator whatever she does.
Under Kamala Harri’s watch, the US State department have overseen – through Matthew Miller (@StateDeptSpox) – a diatribe on genocide, a masterful example of contemporary disinformation and propaganda defending day-in-day-out the atrocities of the Israeli regime, of which they are basically now an extension.
He has stated on camera that: “Israel has the right to target civilians.” In effect he has absolved Israel of any war crimes committed. Through his words, on behalf of the Biden-Harris regime, killing children is sanctioned by the USA.
🚨 Just to be clear — No nation has the right to target civilians—ever.
No matter what this genocide apologist says. Incredible & unbelievable that this was stated so plainly at the podium by the @StateDeptSpox.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has reached diabolical depths. pic.twitter.com/KQ6pLXiT2Z
— AHMED | أحمد (@ASE) October 19, 2024
This is one of the reasons why Harris’s ‘campaign’, if you can even call it that has had such little impact. Sure she is better than Joe Biden, sure. She is better than a man who was visibly failing in his cognitive ability to function at the most basic level.
What we are getting is – as the Americans say – a ‘cookie cutter’ of the failed Hillary Clinton campaign. Say little, do soft interviews, crowd the state with celebrity endorsements, cuddle-up to ‘liberal Republicans’, accentuate your PC credentials, and try and construct an edifice of rhetoric around some outline of liberal feminism.
Resistance to the Harris-Walz campaign tactics – ‘just vibe’ – have been muted after early signs of some success in polling. Such is the nature of American Pepsi-Coke politics that in the middle of a campaign it is very hard to criticise the Democrats without being seen to give succor to the former Republican Party. One exception has been the evergreen Ralph Nader. Nader’s ‘Open Letter Re: October 19th Unconditional Endorsement of Harris/Walz Ticket’ read:
“The October 19, 2024 endorsement of the Harris/Walz Democratic ticket for the Presidency and Vice Presidency by over fifty Lebanese Americans (perhaps some reluctantly) reads as if the Biden Bombs for Israel are not daily destroying more of Lebanon and its civilians with an emerging genocidal pattern as seen in Gaza over the past year. Israel’s terrorism against innocent civilians, health facilities, cafes, residential areas, schools, agricultural terrains, transportation routes, and even banks, are receiving so far the full, cruel support of the Biden/Harris Administration. So where is the storied Lebanese tradition of tough negotiation or bargaining?
The statement failed to condition this support on the White House’s making immediate enforceable demands on Israel to stop this mass annihilation, including women, children, the elderly, and hospital patients, immediately. There is no indication of any reciprocity, simply a plea without any display of political power on behalf of the Lebanese American community. After all, there are over a million Lebanese American voters that the Democratic Party should be keeping in mind.”
Such criticisms are thin on the ground.
The tactic, such as it has been, is to paint Donald Trump and JD Vance as ‘weird’ (with shades of Clinton’s ‘deplorables’); focus on Trump’s cognitive decline and most atrocious and extreme statements and degenerative behaviour. In short the plan is to mock him into submission. As a plan, it has some merits. Trump coughs up daily outrage, spitting out his deranged madness like clockwork. Today there are the revelations that “Stunning new reporting details how Donald Trump groped a model with Jeffrey Epstein. Despicable and disgusting.” Yesterday it was revealed that he wanted “the kind of Generals Hitler had.”
The problem is nobody cares anymore.
Trump’s obscenities – personal or political – have long-ago dissolved into the memetic ether. They are lost in an endless descent on a golden elevator. They have no meaning.
The problem is not that Trump is a fascist danger, who refuses to be bound by the results of the upcoming election. The problem is not the dire threat to democracy or world order or climate catastrophe – the problem is these things are already plunged into dire threat by the very forces represented by his opponent. And what Kamala and Walz’s politics doesn’t recognise is that Trump isn’t just supported by the rednecks and QAnon quacks of the MAGA charicatures but also by people who are so sick of the American shitshow that they are actually drawn to Trump’s flame as a sort of comedic nihilism.
At the same time, who am I to turn against the millions of Americans trying to rally against the madness? The Trump-Vance-Musk ticket represents a catastrophic threat to women’s rights, human rights, ecological stability, worker’s rights, indigenous people’s rights, a direct and violent assault on people of colour, any semblance or pretense at democracy, and further destabilisation of an already wrecked ‘world order’. If we can stare at the Democract regime with contempt we can stare at the possibility of a MAGA regime with absolute fear. The prospect of a fully charged white nationalist ethno-state is terrifying.
The problem is not so much the picture painted by Trump’s opponents, little of which is remotely exaggerated, the problem is their lack of a coherent alternative, their craven inability to build a credible left platform of ideas beyond amplifying Biden’s teams record, and covering-up their dismal record on human rights and funding genocide.
Beyond all of this, it is sobering to see this assessment, beyond all of the noise, that none of this ‘really matters’ at all.
The co-founder of the world’s largest asset manager has said the outcome of the looming US election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump ‘really doesn’t matter’ for financial markets. https://t.co/FI2mArOleC pic.twitter.com/eZic5jF2WN
— Financial Times (@FT) October 21, 2024
John Ash’s point about the Cool Aid is not that Trump’s supporters are wrong or mad, but that the format of public discourse has been so depleted reduced and transformed as to be meaningless.
Nobody comes out of this unscathed.
Hallelujah.
* Actually it’s Rufus Wainwright’s version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ – already subject to a cease and desist letter.
I thought that Trump was very entertaining when he was the prez (as long as you didn’t believe anything he said). The Capitol being over-run by a guy wearing a buffalo? Oh yes! Also, he didn’t instigate an invasion of anywhere, which was a change, but one term is more than enough.
Love the photo of The Donald at a convention of bleached blonds. Perhaps they dyed their hair in honour of whatever it is that Trump wears on his head.
References to court politics seem more accurate than portraying Trump as an ideological fascist; more of a Richard II of England model is emerging:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_II_of_England
with personally-loyal paramilitaries and a war on the enemy within (peasants or whoever). Like many revolutions, the USAmerican one managed to replicate much more of its predecessor (British colonialism) than make a clean break from it.
However, focusing on individuals habitually misses the point. Postwar industrialism, standing armies, personal communications technologies linked to global networks, enormous expenditure on behavioural modification through cultural products, the reinvention and adaptations of patriarchal, misogynistic and racist (Abrahamic etc) religions, the unholy alliance of NATO, state infiltration of anti-Establishment and pro-Planetary-Life groups, and more, have created the selection processes by which these characters have sorted upwards into the spotlight.
I mean, to be fair, it’s not me ‘portraying’ Trump as a fascist its John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, but sure …
@Editor, I was picking up on your use of the word ‘courtisans’. USAmericans often seem to have a blind spot when it comes to monarchy, such as the odd Disney fixation on royalism (for example, two versions of the Lion King show a deeply twisted mockery of biocracy, ruled by a hereditary monarch). It’s like they haven’t quite grasped republicanism. Sure, the USA has faced real fascist plots before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
But recent political dynasties have been more on traditional Anglo-European lines (Bushes, Kennedys etc).
The sad fact is that the US is completely bought and sold by Wall Street. The election is just performative and means nothing at all. (The same is true here in the UK).
This means that politics just means trying to rig or sway elections by whatever means works. Usually that means telling the voters anything they might appeal to them – the truth is of no importance at all. And who cares if what you tell one group contradicts what you tell another? It’s consumer politics driven by advertising industry methods from Edward Bernays.
The big problem with running on lies and manipulation and whatever ‘works’ is that the public become completely disillusioned with ‘democracy’ or their ability for make a difference at all. It ushers in full blown fascism (which I define as rule by self-justifying violence; the nationalist or racist aspects of fascism were just a means to an end). But while violence is initially very effective (the blitzkreig, ‘shock and awe’, etc) it cannot sustain the powerful for very long once opposition gets into gear. The Israelis cannot win their so-called ‘war’ beause there is no limit to the genocide needed.
In America especially, with its belief in the ‘frontier spirit’ I can’t see how a civil war there can now be avoided. Musk would no doubt be delighted, but he’s mad. Really we would do well to insist on our independence from America as well as its UK puppet, and then attend to our own needs and resources – and keep well out of the way.