Donald Trump led his little Children's Crusade on a gleeful march this week down to the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz"—a new immigration detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which right-wing politicians have openly advertised as a human rights atrocity waiting to happen. Cue the "jokes" from the administration about how no one could escape from it without ending up in the guts of an alligator or a python. Such passes for "humor" under the complete and systematic brutalization of our current political culture.
I call it the Children's Crusade since it seems to be the Gen Z members of Trump's staff who delight most—second only to the president himself—in this revolting banter. It's the most perfect display one could ask for of what Johan Huizinga once called "Puerilism." It was a trait he saw as endemic to the political culture of 1930s fascism (which in every respect our current far-right rulers seem intent on mimicking). One recognizes its flavor by the unique combination of sophomoric bullying, crude insolence, and inane jugglery.
Dispatches from the Children's Crusade, courtesy of the New York Times, in which one can see this "Puerilism" in full flower:
The White House had a ball with the backdrop: Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, posted a selfie [...] adding an alligator emoji. The new deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, put out an A.I.-generated video of alligators wearing Immigration and Customs Enforcement hats while dancing to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.” [...] It was all one big joke.
I have no doubt that it is indeed all a big joke to them—even when they are talking about people being devoured by wild animals, or being locked up far from their families and communities, in an isolated swamp, in a form of administrative civil detention—that is, a Constitutionally-suspect system of arbitrary incarceration, for which people do not even have to be first tried and duly sentenced in a criminal court.
I'm sure it's a joke to them because their brains have been so utterly warped by social media that they cannot understand any human experience or pain as something real. They can process it only as an opportunity to "troll."
Fundamentally frivolous, immature, narcissistic, and exhibitionistic people—like the president and his band of MAGA influencers—cannot possibly imagine that any form of human suffering is serious—that it could ever have real stakes for other people—because nothing is serious for them. Nothing has real stakes in their world. Their lives are organized entirely around securing attention on social media. Success is measured by the extent of the provocation. No wonder they forget about reality.
Their lives are meaningless and empty and trivial and low-stakes. So they assume that everything they are talking about—everything they are "trolling" about—everything they are mocking their victims about—must be just as empty and frivolous and fundamentally unserious as they are. The essence of puerility. As Hugh MacDiarmid once described the fascist politicians of the 1930s and their bands of clamoring juvenile adherents—"trolls" avant la lettre:
The most terrifying spectacle the world has ever known,Vast mobilised armies of maddened adolescents
And criminal leaders mouthing the foulest perfidies
Amid roars of loutish laughter and animal applause
That's Donald Trump and his little band of juvenile acolytes—his influencers and Gen Z staffers—turning the suffering and humiliation of others into a meme—for the delectation of their online followers. AI videos of dancing alligators, as a nod to the idea that the government would shortly be locking up people in an alligator-infested swamp under pain of being hunted by wild predators. Maddened adolescents indeed, seeking animal applause.
I was reading an old Gore Vidal essay the other day from the early Bush era. He talks at one point about how Donald Rumsfeld used to get up in his stage-managed press conferences in order to deliver what amounted in effect to stand-up comedy routines—seemingly, to mock "the media"—but really, through them, to mock the American public and the whole idea that we are entitled as citizens and taxpayers to accurate and timely information from the government about its decisions.
"Never before," writes Vidal, "has the American people been treated with such impish disdain."
Impish disdain—I thought that was a good term for it. And what we are seeing now is that this administration could give Rumsfeld a run for his money. Old Rummy hadn't seen anything yet. Thank God Vidal did not live to see the era of the Karoline Leavitt press conference. She could teach Rumsfeld a trick or two. We are truly all viewed now as worthy of nothing better from our leaders than impish disdain.
Either we offer up our daily homage of loutish laughter and animal applause online—or we are to do nothing at all. Certainly, in this administration, we are not allowed to ask honest questions or expect to receive serious answers. This administration doesn't even view a human getting devoured by a giant reptile as a result of their own policies as something worthy of a straight face.
Of course, Trump has always been drawn to the idea of throwing immigrants and other disfavored groups to wild animals—like some sort of Nero or Caligula. Trump's "Roman holiday" has taken the form in the past of asking his immigration officials why the United States couldn't just build a "moat" around its southern border and "fill it with alligators" to snap their jaws around the desperate and vulnerable people who had the temerity to try to enter this country merely in order to survive.
But Trump in these fantasies is projecting his own sadism and cruelty onto a form of wildlife that has little interest in becoming his shock troops. As the Times article observes:
“The only way people really get bit by an alligator is if you step on them,” said James Fourqurean, an associate director in the Institute of Environment at Florida International University. “It is far-fetched that you would step on one, because, you know, they lay hidden. And if you were to step on one and it wheeled around and bit you, it wouldn’t eat you.”
It is a distinctly human form of evil that came up with the idea of imprisoning people far from their loved ones just for crossing an invisible border—or that gloats and cackles with Satanic glee at the idea of their own victims being devoured by pythons or crocodilians. The alligators themselves—precisely because they are animals—do not give "animal applause" to sadistic internet memes or displays of inane, juvenile cruelty. They have no aspiration to persecute and assassinate asylum-seekers.
As Voltaire once observed, in his Treatise on Toleration—it is something of a misnomer to attribute human barbarities to the beasts of the forests. After all, the human practice of persecution is in many ways "worse" that the "law of the jungle"—he writes—because "wild animals kill only to eat, whereas we [humans] have exterminated one another over a parcel of words." (Masters trans.)
It's therefore wrong to make of the alligators a symbol of Trump's cruelty. They are just creatures looking to eat and survive. It is only man—that "vain insect," as Byron once called him—that ever dreamt up the idea of hunting for sport, of persecuting for pleasure, of torturing and confining innocent people just for the mad spectacle of the gladiatorial games or the delectation of "maddened adolescents" watching social media memes on their screens and greeting the humiliation and degradation of others with "loutish laughter and animal applause."
The "animal applause" of which MacDiarmid so aptly spoke is not really "animal" at all. It is human—all-too-human.
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