Why do people love Trump? Because he fails to calculate. Because he's too impulsive for social calculation. Because he acts out the repressed: everything ugly in him is a mirror of what we have repressed. A court jester of hypermodern moral posturing: the delicious freedom to be wrong.
A thousand years ago, we would have dragged him into the town square, painted his face and made him dance his grotesque dance, and finally the women would encircle him and stone him to death. We're groping for the ancient logic of ritual exclusion: like "Año Viejo" is still practiced in Mexico, the instinct is to concentrate everything old, unwanted, repressed and hideous into one sacrificial victim. Crowning this victim "king for a day" is also part of the ritual: the most important thing to learn from James Frazer, is the ancient unity of king and criminal, outsider and ruler, praise and blame. Trump is taboo: it's only dissatisfying and halfbaked, because we are halfbaked as human creatures. We want blood: we're oscillating between the species of systemic violence, between the bureaucratic techno-fascism of the future, and the tyrannical comic bombast of the past. We are afraid of ourselves and our desires. We want to project our aggression and live it vicariously: listen to the hysterical prophesies, and find the desire. Who is it who wants "camps"? Who wants to "round them up"?
When Andy Kaufman became the permanent impersonation of an Elvis knockoff, and persisted in the act such that people began to believe in the existence of this "person", what was he saying? When he makes fun of comedy itself by stretching the premise such that we don't know when to laugh, and most of the crowd shudders while a tiny minority laugh convulsively, what's happening?
So much of the sense of the sacred mask, is the power to contain, neutralize, and recast what is hideous in apenature. To make our ugly impulses into something negotiable, something you don't mind guarding the village gate: envy, greed, hate - in the kachina especially, the ape vices are transformed.
A reader just brought my attention to the professional wrestling term, "kayfabe": the etymology points not only to vaudeville but the conman, since wrestlers will call anyone outside the business a "mark". Increasingly this is the right way to understand politics and democracy. But a simple loss of faith isn't the result. Everywhere there's an erosion of the fourth wall, but no less investment in the outcome: social media is a simulation of sociality, which is already inherently symbolic and thus acted. Eventually, we realize that the power of an illusion is not the eclipse of truth, but the evocation of it: a hideous farce that is more honest than the polished teethrow of bureaucrats demanding your name and occupation - we want relief from the tense, over-your-shoulder-glancing moral posturing. And the lowest common denominator providing such relief is this clown, this preemptive hasbeen stuck in an eternal midlife crisis, this facepaint grandpa nightmare, this nasty hangover from the indulgences of 21st century firstworld anxiety.
But no worries! The ship is careening, the waves are high, the wind is howling - but maybe there's a fourth wall here too: maybe our drama is a tempest in a teapot, maybe terrestrial life surges onward, maybe the continental shelf will swallow our hopes and fears in glorious magma, maybe it's possible to unravel our ball of worry and measure its full length, and be surprised at how far it comes up short. Most likely we aren't worried about the right things. Most likely the sorrows of the future will sneak past us, are already sleeping in the kitchen, and have already assumed shapes we could not guess. Sometimes clickbait headlines are really revealing. Before Halloween last October, one read, "Something could be wrong with your pumpkin."
Let's rephrase in the language of Daoist verse:
There's something wrong with every pumpkin.
But not being wrong, how could there be a pumpkin?
