singing a song of angry men
We have seen it all, have seen it all before. This great lover of showtunes and grievance, this undying televisual man. He grimaces and fabulates and tells weird tales. Of how his son Eric got more subpoenas than Al Capone (“He’s a PhD in subpoenas”). Of his friend, the president of Mexico (“a great gentleman, by the way, socialist, but that’s okay. You can’t have everything”). Of what was taken from him in 2020 (“We were doing great. We were starting to really get it right”). Of executions in China and the “cesspools” of our cities.
His face is now more russet than orange. His fans, his speechwriters, the man himself—they sound like spoiled rich kids and school shooters. They are joyless freaks who hate themselves. Watching it, I feel almost serene. I know it all too well. I can’t watch for very long.
At least two commentators compared him to King Lear. Maybe so. At the beginning of the play, Lear scolds his daughter: “Better thou / Hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.” And toward its end raves, unrepentant: “I am a man / More sinn'd against than sinning.” The former president has always seemed like a fictional character, some archetype of decline. He was, after all, written for TV. But he has yet to be brought truly low.
I have been keeping this almanac for two years now. When I began, he had just been voted out of office. A month later, he was kicked off Twitter. Now he’s running for office again; his Twitter ban has lifted. But he’s under investigation; he’s not his old self; the moguls will back someone else. Someone less absurd but even more fanatical.
Twitter, for its part, is a debacle, newly helmed by another rich weirdo bent on acceptance. Musk’s father, who has had two children with his own step-daughter, recently told Australian reporters he wasn’t proud of Elon, adding not at all sinisterly that “we are a family that have been doing a lot of things for a long time.” And so the disregarded son spends his billions to post unfunny memes, peddle his techno-utopias, and vaunt himself as John Galt or Tony Stark to his fanboys. Even Trump insulted him on his own social media platform, Truth Social: “I could have said [to Musk], ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it. . .”
At Mar-a-Lago, the song plays on. And I’m proud to be an American . . . He stands there like he always has, hulking and ridiculous. He never looks comfortable, even among his supporters. How he must despise them, his standing army of sycophants who remind him, every day, of the people whose favor he will never win. Even his beloved daughter was not in the audience, having recently backed away from politics.
Absent fathers, disappointing sons—it makes for good TV and decent speculation, but paints an inadequate picture of reality. The incessant analyses of our oligarchs start to form a Great Man theory of their own, reading the present era not in the genius of a few men but in their stupidity. In lieu of greatness, their folly takes outsized meaning. Take Bankman-Fried and the recent FTX meltdown or Elizabeth Holmes’s recent sentencing—the more improbable and eccentric they are, the more they seem to get away with, the more indicative of cultural forces they seem to be. The docudramas appear almost instantly, thematizing reality into archetypes: grifters, villains, kings. We’d rather call Trump Lear than face up to what he is.
Watching Trump’s announcement, I wonder what there even is to explain. There’s very little that you can’t learn from any lesser combination of the announcement’s constituent parts. The lurid lies, the militarism, the denial, the tasteless opulence, the bathos of musical theatre, the Cold War country songs, the admiration for AMLO and Xi, the empty invocations of freedom. The barely hidden fury of the recklessly empowered loser.
These men in power are not Great. They rarely are. They are children vying for an approval they will never win. They appropriate democratic slogans to narcissistic ends, trying to turn their complaints into great causes. After conducting a Twitter poll on whether or not Trump’s account should be reinstated, Musk tweeted: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” Voice of the people, voice of God. In Les Misérables, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” is sung twice, including at the very end of the show. The people all singing together, about to begin their charge.
The people. A prop, a user base. Cannon fodder for the petty needs of these dim, unlovable men.
ben tapeworm