Let No One Sleep

Looking at--and beyond--fascism

There’s a tv show on Amazon now called The Boys. It’s not very good, but I trudged through its fourth season both for and despite its politics. It’s a MAGA satire, filtered through the grandiosity of the worst of comic book fascism. No plot summaries here. I think one image will sum it up:

Bear with me. This isn’t, of course, from The Boys. It’s the zombie-apocalypse series The Walking Dead, the season 7 premiere, which introduced a new villain. In the scene pictured above, he’s about to use “Lucille”—a bat wrapped in barbed wire that has since become a meme for the most nihilistic Trump supporters—to kill two beloved characters we thought too central, too good, to die. He kills them as a kind of price of admission for their friends to the cult of which he’s absolute leader. It first aired October 23, 2016.

His name is Negan. Unlike the other would-be leaders we’ve encountered—a sheriff, a wise man, a man called the “governor”—Negan’s qualifications are never stated. He is tall, he is strong, he is, in a grotesque fashion, attractive—it is no accident that they chose Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the tragic love interest of Gray’s Anatomy, to seduce the viewers with evil. He likes to make jokes nobody thinks are funny. He likes to humiliate those who work for him. He likes to name things after himself. And by things, I mean people – a condition of citizenship in Negan’s kingdom is that everybody is Negan, that when asked for your identity, you must say, I am Negan.

Negan thinks that’s funny.

This is the fable of the Trumpocene which recognizes that fascism isn’t about you, the victim. Fascism is about the what Eric Trump at the RNC called, channeling a cartoonish version of a cartoonish figure, Teddy Roosevelt, “the man in the arena.” The narrator of the scene. He who tells the story. Negan tells the story. Trump tells the story. Good story, bad story, stumbling story—it does not matter. He—Negan, Trump—makes himself the subject of every sentence. The victims are the sentence’s objects: Acted upon.

I thought of Negan as I watched The Boys because the actor who portrays him, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, appears in this latest season as—spoiler—the hallucinatory id of one of the show’s protagonists, Butcher, urging him to take any vile step he deems necessary to stop fascism in the form of a Trump-like superhero called Homelander. The rest of the plot—well, no summaries. I thought most of it was boring, too obvious a mockery of MAGA, too on the nose. Overkill.

Then, this week. Butler and Cannon and Vance and Amber Rose and Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock and Ultimate Fighting and Hannibal Lecter. The Hero’s Helmet, on stage, added to the Golden Escalator and the Bullet that Missed. There is no comic book pulpy enough to keep up with what’s happening here. I’ve been writing about rightwing movements for 20 years, reporting on Trumpism for nine, and I can’t keep up with what’s happening here.

Last night I watched the convention’s big show stopper, this morning I watched The Boys, and this afternoon, I confess, I don’t feel capable of putting together a narrative. So I’m gathering the relevant notes I made on Twitter here in one place. Maybe you can use some bit of them to tell a better story.

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Now comes what Fox is calling the “kinder, gentler” Trump, introduced by Ultimate Fighting CEO Dana White, with whom Trump celebrated his conviction by cheering as a fighter audibly & visibly snapped another man’s arm just feet away. Then the bone-breaker knelt before Trump.

Did the camera just cut to “proud Islamophobe,” white supremacist Laura Loomer as Trump said "God was with me?"

(It had. And would so again.)

A "providential moment" says Trump of God’s intervention on his behalf. “Providence” elevates it from saving grace to destiny. Trump is saying that God chose him to be president, or leader, or ruler. Shofars—Jewish ritual instruments made of ram’s horns, appropriated by Christian nationalists, blown outside the Capitol on January 6—heralded his anointing.

I loathe him with all my heart. But if you're telling yourself he's bombing, you're selling yourself a reassurance narrative. This is powerful stuff--and the "stuff" is fascism. We do ourselves no favors by pretending this is weaker than it is. We must face it, & defeat it.

Now he IS getting boring, not just by my standards, but by MAGA standards. I've seen what they experience as "good" speeches and bad ones. This one started, in Trumpian terms, great. And now has deflated. So let's get a real campaign going and defeat him.

(I spoke too soon.)

!! Trump: "You can go back to Germany 100 years ago," he says, speaking of inflation, and what it justifies...

Fuck. He's getting a second wind.

Goddamn. He's back in form. I've seen this in Trump speeches before. He gets lost, then finds his fascist groove, and the crowd loves him more for it. It's like an idiot blowhard version of Rocky, but it works for them. You can hear them blow the shofars.

A friend says he's meandering. I wish. For Trumpism--for fascism--he's in the Word, as some of the Christian nationalists in the crowd would put it. I've endured a lot of these; there's a moment, when it's gone on too long, that the crowd loves him more for that fact. Stalin, Castro: there’s a long history of authoritarians projecting “strength” by talking forever.

"Illegal immigrant invasion. There's never been an invasion like this before. Third world countries would fight with sticks and stones to stop this." Politico and every fucking pundit who spoke of a "pivot": Eat those sticks and stones. This is fascism.

He's doing the thumb and index finger thing now. It's a Trump gesture, his pincer, but for years now he's known it's read also as the OK symbol of white power. That's not conspiracy: He doesn't "mean" it as that, but he knows they see it as that.

And now comes the growling portion of a Trump speech, along with "The Chart," the immigration lies he turned to look at in Butler, saving his life by a millimeter. This is the violent parable of Trumpism.

Here we go. Hannibal Lecter. I am so filled with anger right now for every pundit who suggested, nine years in, that Trump might now "pivot."

"Home invasion." In high school I had a civics teacher who taught us "civics" by showing us a compilation snuff flick called Faces of Death. I think of this every time I hear a Trump speech like this one. He IS Clockwork Orange.

"No arms, no legs, face explosions." If you listen to a Trump speech for coherence, you reassure yourself that it's garbage. But if you read it as image and fear and emotion, you get the threat.

Then he cuts to Sam Brown, NV GOP candidate & victim of an actual "face explosion."

This crowd of middle-aged hate dumplings roars for his attack on trans kids. Adults, cheering for one of the most powerful people in the world, promising to hurt children.

"My father"--Fred, KKK enthusiast--"used to take me to see Billy Graham." Billy to Nixon: "if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something"--about "the Jews": "They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff."

PBS pundit: "They got the LONG speech they wanted." On the one hand, yes: He's peddling snake oil virility, so let's name that. On the other: let's name that: It is snake oil, & "virility" is an idiot artifact of grotesque notions of gender.

Are they closing the rally out with Pavarotti? From the first rally I ever attended in '16, Youngstown, OH, for NYT, after which I said, "this is fascism. Put me on the fascism beat." (They didn’t.)

We had been waiting five hours by then, standing crushed together on the concrete floor of a hangar at a regional airport in Youngstown, Ohio, cycling through Candidate Trump’s rally playlist, swaying together to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” hopping to Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.” We hadn’t really known what to do with the aria, Pavarotti’s “Nessun dorma,” but we sensed that it was grand— “This is special!” said a woman behind me. Such was the mood, the deep pleasure of waiting derived not just from the speech to come but from a building sensation of togetherness, rolling vibrations of solidarity and giddiness and anticipation.

“First protester,” Kim’s husband declared, soon after we were packed in next to one another close to the podium. “I’ve got dibs.”

Kim wore a pink top and a heart-shaped sapphire ring; the rest of her jewelry was turquoise and swirling green malachite. For a beat she gave her husband a look, the serious kind—then it cracked, and she beamed with the sweet comic timing of a couple long in love.

“Oh, Gene!” she said.

Gene looked down on his lady with a sly smile. “I’m gonna beat the shit out of him,” Gene promised, “and get on CNN.”

As it turns out, it wasn’t Pavarotti last night at the RNC; Pavarotti’s widow has since forbidden Trump’s use of her husband’s voice. So it was another opera singer performing “Nessun dorma,” which means “Let no one sleep.”

I didn’t sleep well last night. I dreamt I was in a bar with two journalists my age, both dead now, my friend Matt Power and his friend Brad Will. They’d been anarchists together in the East Village squats, but Matt turned to writing. Brad, more of an activist, had concluded that storytelling was his calling, too. He died in 2006, covering a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca, filming the policeman who shot him. He saw the bullet coming. Matt died in 2014, reporting a story in Uganda. In my dream, we were talking together when a musclebound white man, cueball-bald, sat between us but kept shouting to his friends across the bar. “Hey, man,” I said, “this is kind of private conversation.” “A conversation?” the man said. He stood up. It was Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship! He snorted. “Conversation?” He was right—Matt and Brad were no longer there. I was alone. “Retard,” he said, and flicked me in the forehead. He flicked me again. He flicked me again.

This morning, I read a NYT news headling, “Trump Struggles to Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage,’” and a NYT columnist’s take on the convention: “Trump couldn't resist returning to darkness.”

With darkness Trump became president, took over a party, and now threatens the world. Why does anyone imagine he wants to "resist" it? Why do they still pretend darkness can't win?

It isn’t inevitable—but stopping it requires seeing it. Evaluating Trump's speech according to democracy's laws of physics makes as much sense as declaring what we don't know about black holes "impossible." Fascism exerts a different gravity. The speech fuses the base; it's the "confidence" of the base that draws in "undecideds." That's how fascism "works." It doesn't have to be how fascism wins. But defeating it, I suspect, means at least a larger number of us discarding our reassurance narratives. Looking at the awfulness dead on, & fighting that, not what we wish it was.

Trump is a grotesque; he broadcasts, and only some can receive such a signal. But many of those aren't, in everyday life, grotesques themselves. It's their belief that persuades some. Their confidence. Their delusion. Trump speeches are for them, not for undecideds. Telling yourself no undecided could be drawn into Trumpism's obscene narcissism is by definition self-deception. The fact that someone's undecided, nine years in, means that they're not immune. They haven't caught Trumpism yet, but they aren't vaxxed, either.

It's also important to emphasize that "undecideds" are a vestige of a vanished political order. It's not that they don't matter; but they matter much less. Trump's campaign hacks may still care, but I think Trump knows he has two paths to power. The first isn’t through undecideds, it's the activation of the base. If his base roars and democracy--that's what I'm calling the other option, whoever represents it--mutters, he takes power.

If you're reading this you've probably read the reporting on the extensive legal groundwork Trumpism has established not to "contest" the election, as MSM, still operating pre-2016, puts it, but to overthrow it. But that's only part of that picture. Trumpism is a many-headed beast. Wonks do the legal stuff. Trump does the myth stuff. "Lies" is an accurate term, too, as far as it goes, but it doesn't express how the lies work. “Myth” speaks to belief. The myth stuff right now is preparing the public for overthrowing the election if he loses. Preparing his followers to believe it justified, attempting to prepare the rest of us to acquiesce.

And yet, if Trumpism has multiple means of seizing power, that means there are multiple ways we can push it back. But only if we let ourselves see it coming.

I said above that the anarchist journalist Brad Will saw the bullet that killed him coming. In the video he was filming, there’s a puff of smoke from the policeman’s gun a bang! before Brad falls down. It was too late to stop that bullet, but Brad was there, bearing witness, because he’d let himself see it—fascism—coming, and he decided to do what he could to stand in the way. He did not mean to die. I don’t think he was a martyr, and neither did Matt Power, who wrote of his friend this:

And so Brad joined the populous firmament of Latin America’s disappeared and assassinated. Los caidos—the fallen—are many, from Zapata to Che to the nameless occupants of a thousand secret graves. In an open letter, the masked Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos called Brad a “compañero”—a comrade. He was proclaimed a martyr for the cause of social justice and democracy, but no matter how passionate he was, Brad would never have wanted to be a martyr, mainly because martyrs are dead, and he was profoundly alive. Martyr-dom obscures the reality of the person, changes them into an idea, a name to be chanted, to be put up on a wall as a mural or graffiti.

But since we the living can do with the dead what we wish, I’d rather remember a moment with Brad from the freight-train ride we took down the Appalachians that summer years ago. We stood in the open doorway in the warm air, our feet right on the edge above the flashing sleepers, and watched in awe as the train rolled out over a long trestle, the ground dropping away. We were somewhere in America, and a wide green river—maybe the Potomac, maybe the Susquehanna—shrouded in evening mist and edged with trees, rolled out a hundred feet below us and bent far off into the dusky evening light. Brad whooped with delight as he tried to hold himself steady and snap a picture. The vast world was framed in all its mysteries and all its possibilities in that open doorway, and the last light cast our shadows against the back wall of the boxcar. We were young and alive and free, and it seemed as though the racketing train had somehow taken flight.

I wrote about Brad, too. I ended my essay with a line from a long and wild poem that had inspired him, “Chaos,” by Hakim Bey: “The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us.” The last, and the first: perception, seeing, the threat and the possibility that always remains of something more lovely beyond.

UPDATE:

A comment received below:

Jonathan Korman

Superb as usual. I especially like your references to myth, as I tend to summarize fascism to people as "not a policy ideology, but rather a myth + a method".

I must also register for anyone unfamiliar with Hakim Bey that he was a pedophile. I greatly admire his work, but one must read it informed with the knowledge of his poisonous side.

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2006/10/hakim-bey.html

I read Jonathan’s account at the link, and indeed, it does seem Bey used his anarchist writings as a justification for at least his own advocacy of sexual abuse. I didn’t know this, and I don’t think Brad Will did, either. But I know it now, which is why I’m adding this. We don’t amend the past by erasing it, but by confronting what we now know. We don’t, as in Trumpism and sometimes across the political spectrum, make unconditional pledges of loyalty to leaders or writers or artists.

JD Vance, in his convention speech, subtly invoked the post-liberal, anti-democratic ethos of his politics, speaking of the U.S. not as an “idea” but a “nation." That is, not bound by a common commitment toward achieving democracy but through loyalty to blood and soil. I understand the appeal of rejecting abstraction, of loving where and who we are, but I’m holding onto the imagination of who we might yet be. We need never defend our failures, our own or those of leaders or artists we may have admired, if we remain open to the possibilities of becoming.

So I won’t delete the quote—won’t pretend it wasn’t there. But I won’t defend it, either. I don’t need to, because I don’t need Bey to believe there remains something more lovely yet beyond.