The Horror in the Heart of Farce

 Michael Kruse published a great essay in Politico yesterday, describing how Trump uses humor to make his extreme views and misbehavior more palatable to his audience. Trump has been described many times as more an entertainer than a politician, and it can't be denied that he has the beats and timing of an accomplished comedian. As Kruse's article points out, his rallies often have more the feel of an off-color stand-up routine than a stump speech. And as the piece goes on to observe, Trump is not unique in this regard. It's a tactic that has been deployed by other demagogues before him. 

The strategy has also proved remarkably effective. On paper, after all, Trump's alleged crimes are horrifying (he has conspired to subvert a federal election; he has compromised the nation's security by willfully retaining classified documents, etc.). No less appalling are Trump's openly-avowed plans for the future: his commitment to building new detention camps, his promise of retribution against his political opponents, his pledge to carry out a mass deportation campaign that would rip apart communities. But by making a punchline of it all, it just... doesn't seem real. 

By appearing to invite laughter at these rallies, Kruse says, even while discussing his own crimes, Trump manages to diminish the horror of his past actions and his future plans (even to erase the impact they will have on their intended victims). He manages to make it all seem like a joke. Thus, anyone who doesn't chuckle must be either clueless or a scold. And his followers have run with this dynamic from the start of his first candidacy. "You shouldn't take him so literally," they tell us. "Can't you see he's kidding? If the stakes of all this were really as high as you say, how come we're all laughing?" 

They are like the villagers in Ionesco's satirical play Rhinoceros (intended as a metaphor for the spread of fascism). Even as all the people around them are falling victim to a mysterious plague that is turning the townspeople into rhinoceroses one by one, they still try nevertheless to convince the protagonist that he shouldn't be concerned. As one of them tells the play's hero—who remains in the final act the last human standing amidst a town that has willingly embraced rhinocerization: "You've no sense of humor, that's your trouble [....] You must learn to see the funny side of things." (Prouse translation). 

The essential thing to stopping the plague of Trumpification, then, is to somehow show people that the humor merely conceals something that is not really funny at all. We have to learn to see "the horror in the heart of farce," as the closing monologue puts it, in Bertolt Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Tabori trans.)—another play about fascism. We have to see what Trump is trying to obscure with all his wisecracks and ribbing. We have to see that behind the mask of laughter are the tears of the families he has separated and will separate in future; the people whose freedom he is threatening to take away. 

I happened to be reading Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons this afternoon, not expecting to find anything relevant to this, when I was confronted with a passage that seemed to describe exactly what Kruse is talking about. The passage could not be said to make sense in context—Stein's work is at the outer fringes of modernist literary experimentation, and mostly does not lend itself to interpretation. But its general impenetrability makes those few places where sense and meaning seem to intrude flash out like lightning: "If the persecution is so outrageous that nothing is solemn is there any occasion for persuasion."

Yes that's a period at the end of that sentence. Stein would not help us out so much or bow to such mere linguistic conventions as to give a sentence with the form of a rhetorical question the appropriate punctuation mark. But if we read it as an interrogative, we can see how it applies to our present. Trump's behavior, words, and campaign promises are so ludicrously awful that people can't even feel solemn about them. It all becomes an exercise in parody. And Trump milks this for all it's worth. He makes jokes, as Kruse points out, about his own criminal charges, minimizing any hope of "solemnity." 

We have to somehow pierce the veil of this humor. We need to see the evil that his gags and pratfalls conceal. We need to learn to see the horror in the heart of Trump's farce.