The National Work Of Fantasy
A former president of the United States has now been criminally indicted for a fourth time. Less than a decade ago, we would have assumed a sentence like that would be found only in a work of fiction. Never in the history of our country has a former president faced one, let alone four, criminal indictments.
It's indisputable that even Tom Clancy, the author of deep state-military thrillers like Clear and Present Danger who foresaw the 9/11 attacks, didn't remotely predict that one US president would be indicted four times as news broke of another allegedly collecting tens of millions in foreign bribes. The problem is that these headlines are playing out in a dreamlike context where they've begun to have the same effect as “I was Bigfoot’s Love Slave,” “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby,” or “Bat Child Found in Cave”.In other words, if a writer at MSNBC wonders if the Trump indictments sound like a bad Tom Clancy knockoff, maybe it's because that's what they are. Consider yesterday's report from the Marist Institute on their latest poll:
Many Republicans are unfazed by former President Donald Trump’s legal woes. While a majority of Americans say Trump should abandon his 2024 presidential bid, most Republicans and nearly half of independents want Trump to carry on. About two in three who align with the GOP consider Trump to be the best person to lead the Republican Party in 2024 and plan to back the embattled former president over his Republican rivals. Trump leads GOP primary rival, Ron DeSantis, by more than two-to-one in a head-to-head matchup. And, bolstered by support among independents, Trump runs competitively against President Joe Biden in a general election rematch.
And Marist leans Democrat. This phenomenon takes me back to Paul Fussell's remarks in Class about alien baby headlines in the tabloids, that the working-class readers aren't stupid, they're fully aware that neither Elvis nor JFK has been found alive, but they enjoy a certain level of tall-tale entertainment. The problem with the current state of discourse is that the people who think they control the media have lost track of this distinction -- they think they're reimagining a new version of reality in which alien babies or Elvis found alive are credible, when the public has always had the basic good sense to know they aren't.Exactly when the soi-disant masters of the universe fell into this delusion is hard to trace. Just this morning I ran into a reference to this remark from 2008: “The bad thing is that the federal government has figured out that it can borrow a lot more money than it previously thought,” and this takes me back to the dreamlike environment portrayed in The Big Short where strippers were buying multiple homes, refinancing them, and buying more.
But certainly as of 2020, the media mainstream was writing freakout headlines like "Superbug Virus Threatens To Wipe Out Human Race!" and expecting the proles to believe it, which set off three years of conflict in which the proles, complaining they couldn't understand why they couldn't go to work, go to the beach, or go to church, undertook an ultimately successful campaign of passive resistance against the tabloid-headline propaganda, or more accurately, that one particular manifestation of tabloid-headline propaganda.
At roughly the same time, we began to get another set of tabloid headlines, "Scientists Say Boys Can Turn Into Girls!" That brought us Dr Rachel Levine and Dylan Mulvaney, and it evoked yet another insight from Paul Fussell's Class. A piece in The Atlantic from 2009 prophetically summarized part of Fussell's point:
Some 25 years have passed since the publication of Paul Fussell’s naughty treat Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, and I think this quarter-century mark merits the raising of either a yachting pennant, an American flag, or a wind sock with the Budweiser logo (corresponding to Fussell’s demarcations of Upper Class, Middle Class, and Prole).
But how, 14 years after The Atlantic's summary, we find the proles have risen to tear down that very emblem of their class status, the Budweiser logo. And they've done it in rebellion over the upper class's appropriation of that emblem, in the person of the Budweiser marketer Alissa Heinerscheid, the upper-class, oh-so-Episcopalian woman who is neither too rich nor too thin, who eagerly expected the proles to believe the tabloid headline "Scientists Say Boys Can Turn Into Girls!" and buy lots of Budweiser beer.That worked about as well as "Superbug Virus Threatens To Wipe Out Human Race!" That in turn worked about as well as "Strippers Get Rich Flipping Florida Homes!" Now we get "President Trump Indicted For The Fourth Time!" Fussell said, or at least he claimed at one time to believe, that the proles dig this stuff for entertainment, but they don't actually believe it. Maybe he had a point.
On the other hand, at the end of his life in Doing Battle, he claimed he never meant Class to be taken seriously, it was just a big windup. Still, it's hard not to conclude that his model of prole opinion has some weight -- the proles can recognize a tabloid headline when they see it, and they take it as seriously as it deserves to be taken. The masters of the universe have yet to figure this out. The elites dismiss the commmon sense of the workers at their peril.
