A
Country Run From A Country Club
By Frankie
Boyle
February 20, 2017 "Information
Clearing House" -
Say
what you like about Donald Trump but he's
already done things people said were impossible,
like made Twitter worse. Looking back, the
Harambe situation is the closest working model
we have for a Trump presidency. Last week he
gave the sort of press conference that in a
movie would bring a weary superhero out of
retirement. His answers were filled with
pointless digressions and absurd sentence
construction, like he was desperately trying to
avoid the buzzer on some unfathomable new Radio
4 panel game. And yet I wonder if Trump isn't
playing to his base quite effectively: grievance
is a key part of his appeal, and chaos may well
just look like him butting heads with Washington
insiders. His approval rating among Republicans
was 84%, before he started what will no doubt be
a series of rallies. Even Trump isn't stupid
enough to think he's still fighting an election,
so the assumption has to be that he's trying to
enthuse his base to create pressure for his
agenda on Republicans in Congress.
Trump's
base are people who believe that the U.S is a
country run by elites enabled by mainstream
media propaganda. Which, awkwardly, it is.
Distorted media has been around for as long as
Rupert Murdoch. By the look of him that would
include telling Moses the commandments would go
down much better if he took the third tablet and
carved a pair of tits on it. I do feel for
Rupert. Not least the arthritic tadpoles that
shuffle around in his scrotum, clutching their
tiny hearts every time they hear Jerry’s voice,
muffled by his adult nappy. Trump isn't
inventing public disillusionment with the news
media, just as he hasn't invented their
dissatisfaction with the fruits of globalisation.
He has co-opted these grievances, and followed
the pattern of his whole life by bringing a lot
of disparate stuff under the Trump brand.
The
loyalists Trump has appointed form a kind of
intellectual wing of anti-intellectualism, but
really they're pouring out of the gates of
Mordor so fast it's hard to keep track of them
all without some kind of bestiary. Steve Bannon,
who has the name and face of a relegation
haunted Scottish football manager, agitates for
a white supremacy that already exists. Ironic,
really, that one of the main things his
Administration seems to have illustrated is that
only black people are good at being President.
Seemingly every day we have the unveiling of
some new cabinet member who has stepped
screaming into our dimension after being
outwitted by a Princess in a cautionary
folktale. If Trump nominated his horse as a
consul it would be a blessed relief.
|
Not For Profit - For Global
Justice
|
The
modern far-right have a lot in common with
Jihadis in that their sexual desperation has
been used to radicalise them online. The Brexit
and Trump campaigns have been their training
camps: the equivalent of a few weeks in some
desert barracks shooting an AK-47 into an old
mattress. Imagine the adrenaline surge of
feeling responsible for a huge election upset.
And then they have to go back to normal life. A
life where during the 10 minutes they had their
picture up on Tinder it was left-swiped so many
times they got whiplash due to voodoo. Where
they look like Joseph Merrick carried a
photograph of their face in his wallet as an
appetite suppressant. Where their mail-order
bride heard who she was being delivered to and
chewed off her toes just so she had something to
block up the air holes in her crate. And so they
channel their energy back into the trenches of
hate that now pass for political discourse, to
where they feel safe and newly empowered.
There's never been a better time to be wrong.
I
sometimes think that the new right have arisen
without warning, then I remember that there were
loads of warnings but I just kept muting and
blocking them all. In all the hilarity of Trump,
in the all the cluelessness of Brexit; in the
sheer inchoate, transparent, head shaking, WTF
of it all, it's easy to forget that we are
losing. We sign petitions while they sign
executive orders, pass laws, remove regulation.
We share pictures of them signing away our
rights as caption competitions. And yes, I
realise columns like this aren't any more
effective. There's obviously a limit to the need
for humorous metaphor when describing a society
literally being run from a country club.
The
disillusioned electorate that voted for Trump
are right to feel the establishment doesn't care
about them, it rarely even considers them. The
Democratic Party's response to Trump has had all
the zip of an adulterous journalist phoning in
coverage of a conference they didn't attend, and
there isn't a war he could declare that they
won't back. For Republicans, Trump's
unpredictability is tolerated because his
ideology largely overlaps their own. These are
disaster capitalists and Trump is their
unnatural disaster. They look to adapt to and
capitalise on the situation as they would try to
find profit in any scenario from hurricane to
plague. Whatever happens next, it's certainly
not going to be dull. Or survivable.
Francis Martin Patrick Boyle (born 16 August
1972) is a Scottish comedian and writer, well
known for his pessimistic and often
controversial sense of humour
