Merde

 Over the weekend—in response to nationwide protests against his rule—the president of the United States chose to post an AI-generated video on social media of himself spraying the American people with poop. 

We're so inured to this sort of thing by now it barely registered. I thought: "well that's perfectly typical of him" (In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, to borrow a line from the poet Isaac Rosenberg). AI slop from our hog president. And I moved on.

But let's actually linger on this a moment and try to recapture a sense of what a bizarre and disturbing spectacle this actually is—and see if we can wring any larger meaning out of it.  

Michelle Goldberg over at the New York Times had the best analysis of what—if anything—we should make of the sight of the American president fantasizing in public about dropping feces from an airplane on the heads of his own citizens. 

What is most obvious about the episode, of course, is Trump's usual Freudian anality—his Père Ubu quality that combines infantile narcissism, sadism, and a craving to degrade everything he touches—as Goldberg calls it: "his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office."

What's less obvious is why so many Americans appear to respond positively to Trump taking an enormous dump on their country—and on their own heads. 

Goldberg compares it to the appeal of 1930s fascist and totalitarian political movements. She quotes a passage from Hannah Arendt that theorizes that many people found these ideologies liberating and counter-cultural at the time—precisely because they openly subverted all norms of civilization and human decency. 

In their frank rejection of other-directed morality; their crass bullying and amoralism; their vicious sadism toward the weak and glorification of petty tyrants; they seemed like a perfect inversion of all established human values. 

And for many people—this was exactly the appeal. At least they didn't pretend. At least they weren't hypocrites. They sought power and advantage; they embraced the law of the jungle and of the Darwinian struggle. Meanwhile, the so-called Establishment did the same, but they tried to hide it—they tried to obscure their real motives behind a mask of public decency. At least the fascists dropped the pose... 

The inversion of all ethical values in fascism therefore struck many people as freeing in the same way that Dadaism's inversion of all aesthetic values did in the arts. No wonder that many avant garde intellectuals signed up for the fascist program in its early years. In some ways, it was just living out the values of surrealism in public. It had replaced the scripted moral codes of "bourgeois" society with the unmotivated cruelty of the acte gratuit. As André Breton had put it: "The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd."

Trump obviously embodies this surrealist spirit. He unconsciously echoed Breton in his famous remark that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and still not lose any voters. 

Many people seem to respond to Trump, then, the way they do to absurdist comedy or Dadaist conceptual art. He is a sort of performance artist in the White House.The people who defend his most conscienceless and repulsive acts as hilarious "trolling" see him as merely someone who knows how to épater les bourgeois. 

Trump's AI-generated fantasy of dumping feces on the heads of urban America is obviously conceived in the same spirit. Indeed—in Nathanael West's Dream Life of Balso Snell—the titular playwright imagines that his most daring and avant garde work—his masterpiece of Dadaism—would be a piece that ends with dropping human excrement on the heads of the entire audience. Pretty punk rock, no? 

Such, at least, is how some people defend Trump. In sowing the forces of cultural chaos, he is merely liberating us, they imply, from all the false poses and rigidities of conventional morality—the pieties of the Establishment. In doing so, he is making what D.H. Lawrence called a "revolution for fun"—one waged not on behalf of any great constructive vision, but simply because "it would be fun to upset the apple-cart/ and see which way the apples would go a-rolling." 

That is the root of what Michelle Goldberg rightly calls the "giddy nihilism" of Trump's movement—the adoration Trump receives from people who see "his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling." What Lawrence was really describing, after all—and what the Surrealists and the fascists both achieved in their different ways—was the trolling of all traditional human values. 

Such, then, appears to be the MAGA worldview: When contemplating the po-faced politicians of yesteryear, with their lofty rhetoric of public purposes and a world-liberating mission disguising the usual base scramble for position and money and advantage—who wouldn't imagine—however momentarily—that it would be psychologically freeing to see someone pull the mask off the whole charade—to elect Ubu Roi himself (and did not Trump's AI video feature the words "King Trump" on the side of his jet?) to forthrightly gratify all his narcissistic impulses with abandon—without all the hypocritical pretense—in  short, to metaphorically spray the country with shit? 

If it's all shit anyway—why not have a politician who revels in shit, like a pig in mud? Why not elect Recktall Brown for president (to borrow the name of a William Gaddis character)? 

So goes their thinking, at any rate. 

It's an incredibly dangerous attitude for any society to adopt, of course—a sign of deadly defeatism and rancid decadence that prepares the way for totalitarianism. Indeed, it's the same attitude that Arthur Koestler found in France—on the eve of the country's ignominious capitulation to the Nazis: the sort of all-pervading cynicism that makes—as he put it—"[n]o attempt to discriminate, to discover political motive-patterns; everything is merde and pourriture, one ubiquitous, all-embracing conspiracy of betrayal." 

This is MAGA thinking—the belief that everything was merde and corruption already, and always was; at least Trump is honest about it. At least he aspires to nothing higher—makes no pretense of anything higher—than of using his power as president to beshit the nation—to smear us all with merde from the skies. 

This explains too the MAGA fascination with confidence men and dirty tricksters—people like George Santos (whom Trump went out of his way to pardon this week—since he's become a MAGA darling), disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, Roger Stone, and Trump himself—con artists, in short; the worst sorts of frauds and fakes. 

People know that these men are fraudsters; they don't care. Indeed—that's a recommendation in their eyes. They see these men as merely pulling the mask off society to reveal the great pretense that it was all along. 

As a character puts it in Alasdair Gray's The Fall of Kelvin Walker (a parable about the will to power, featuring a Scottish protagonist who is a sort of monster of worldly asceticism—and whose youthful infatuation with Nietzsche therefore leads logically back to a mature reconciliation with the materialistic Calvinism of his ancestors): "All these chairmen and directors and governors and politicians, they're all confidence tricksters. Nobody but a fool thinks they're more virtuous than the rest of us [....] And if you can only kick your way onto the ladder at the very top rung you'll have shown the whole system to be as insanely arbitrary as it is."

I suspect this is very much how George Santos sees the world; it's probably how he justifies himself in his own eyes. And I'm sure it's why he has become a sort of everyman hero to hordes of the MAGA faithful, who can project their own longing to defile and unmask the system onto him. 

It's a great defense mechanism for the chronically insecure. A mediocrity can tell himself that everyone else is faking it too—so why shouldn't he? Like the charlatan protagonist of E.E. Cummings's poem, "The Ballad of an Intellectual"—it's comforting to discover "Not I am a fake,but America’s phoney! / Not I am no artist,but Art’s bologney!"

And there's always just enough truth to these charges against society to make them stick. Organized society does subsist, to some extent, on pretense. The notion of our established order as a meritocracy is indeed a fable. The way rewards are dispensed through established channels is indeed unfair—so why not subvert the whole thing? Why not "upset the apple cart" and "see which way the apples go a-rolling"?

Why not nakedly pursue power and money through graft and fraudulence and corruption—since isn't everyone else doing a version of same thing; it's just that they hide it better? 

Anyone who tries to meet these arguments by asserting that the established order is pure-hearted and good is doomed to fail. People aren't going to be persuaded by that. This is probably part of why institutionalist political parties around the world are finding themselves at such a disadvantage against the new wave of anti-establishment far-right populist (ahem, let's be real—fascist) political parties sweeping elections in the developed world. 

You can't meet the "giddy nihilism" of political movements that embody people's repressed urge to smear the pretentious Establishment with shit by simply begging people to respect the Establishment again. 

The only thing we can do is to try to make people see that their perception of some unfairness or injustice in the existing order only makes sense if we posit some absolute values beyond it. As Camus argues in The Rebel, the true rebel against the Establishment is implicitly affirming a vision of the society that ought to be. 

If we say: the existing order is merde, surely we are saying that we can imagine some way it could be that is not merde. And if we can only pursue that thought—as Camus wrote elsewhere—it means that "even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism." (O'Brien trans.)

It therefore makes no sense to celebrate someone for reveling in greed and corruption and injustice and cruelty—since these were the very bases of our critique of the established order. If we want to rebel against the society that was, we should rebel even more against someone who wants to take the worst and most grotesque features of that society—and exaggerate them still further. 

Trump is not actually a rebel, after all. He is not a performance artist or avant garde surrealist. He is indeed making a kind of caricature of the worst and most odious features of American decadence—but it is not to make a satirical point. It is because he is himself a caricature of all those things.

Trump is a living embodiment of the corruption and materialism and bullying chauvinism and racism and vileness that were indeed always features of American society*—but in their most extreme and crude forms, with none of the redeeming hopes that have also—throughout our history—enabled our country to aspire to something better. 

When Trump says that America is shit, is merde, this is not a critique for him. He's not positing something better that we can strive for; some ultimate scale of values. He's delighted with the prospect of the country as nothing but amber waves of merde. He's in hog heaven. He wants to get on his back and roll in it. 

And if you're still thinking to yourself: "sure, he's a nihilistic monster of infantile narcissism—but so is everyone else—he's just more honest about it"—well, we have some historical experience under our belts at this point, to tell us what happens when societies reach this level of cynicism and disillusionment.

Continental Europe in the 1930s staked their whole futures on the proposition: "this new breed of bullying sadistic autocrat could hardly be any worse than the cynical corrupt politicians we had already." 

And how did that work out for them? 

Oh, America, it can indeed get worse than how it was before. It can get so much worse...

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*I mentioned William Gaddis's character "Recktall Brown" above—and indeed, in the latter's combination of imposture, charlatanry, greed for lucre, and scatology, he brings together a number of Trumpian, George Santosian themes.