America is holding its breath as the November midterm elections approach. It shouldn’t be like this. Even in semi-normal times, Trump and his party would have been finished. The country is almost mired in a semi-war, prices are rising, the housing market is effectively frozen. Most important of all, Trump’s megalomania gets worse, if that’s possible, by the day. America 250th the anniversary party has now been transformed into Trump’s 80sth birthday party. He’s erecting a giant fighting cage on the White House lawn overlooking “the people’s house” and preparing to “headline” the national holiday himself.
He is so corrupt that, on Thursday June 11, he reversed his stated intention to attack Iran with almost comically false claims that, as he has bombastically trumpeted many times before, a peace deal is about to be signed. Rather, he appeared to be paving the way for his friend Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO the next day — as the resumption of hostilities never fails to lower the market due to a sudden spike in oil prices. And Trump wanted his billionaire friend to have smooth sailing. This is all extremely stupid, selfish and inward-looking. Considering that the party out of power almost always wins a majority in midterm elections, Americans numbed and enraged by Trump, even some Maga types, should rejoice.
Instead, the media is full of stories about Trump calling a Maga candidate’s recent loss in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff a scam. He has ordered the Justice Department to intensify its investigation into the 2020 presidential election, which Trump still insists was stolen from him. He appointed an unqualified lackey as acting director of national intelligence after the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, and then suddenly announced that he would name a qualified lackey as the next director. Both figures — Bill Pulte and now Jay Clayton — have supported Trump in his disputed claims of widespread election fraud. The fear now is that as the nation’s top spy, Clayton will mobilize America’s spy agencies to persecute Trump’s perceived enemies on a much larger and more damaging scale. If Republicans lose their majority in November by a handful of seats, which seems like the most likely scenario, you can bet Trump will declare a national election fraud crisis to hold on to power. Then the hapless and clueless Democrats must ask themselves, what do we do?
The country found itself in a roughly similar place in 1974, when Nixon, drinking heavily and in the midst of a nervous breakdown, reportedly considered military action to avoid impeachment and impeachment. Some say the lupine-jawed Alexander Haig—a four-star Army general who was Nixon’s chief of staff and actually ran the country during Nixon’s impeachment—was poised to execute a military coup. But if this is true, he stopped; Nixon resigned peacefully.
There were several circumstances that led to Nixon’s resignation to his fate, not the least of which was the bipartisan determination to impeach him if he didn’t—Republicans were not then the seditious cowards they are now. But perhaps an even greater factor that convinced Nixon that a coup had no future was this: a vigorous counterculture had been preparing the nation’s collective consciousness for his sudden departure for years.
America has never been in a crisis like this. However, this is the first time in American history that the country does not have a counterculture, let alone a fierce, strong one, to resist. The consolidation of wealth and business culture in the 1920s saw the Harlem Renaissance and the growth of a bohemian counterculture downtown in Greenwich Village. During the conformist 1950s and the mutation of business culture into corporate culture, the Beats flourished. In the late 1960s and 1970s, when the country was rife with backlash against civil rights, domestic terrorism, a devastating unpopular war, and a maniacal, criminal president, the American counterculture became a global inspiration. In Iran, although students opposing the Shah deplored “Westernization,” they expressed their dissent by wearing bell boots and skirts (in the US, bells were a statement against the war).
During the American meltdown of the late 1960s and 1970s, you could find the witty plays of Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and David Rabe, and Ed Bullins and Sam Shepard. There was Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater and Ellen Stewart’s LaMama Experimental Theater Club. poster Why are we in Vietnam?? Baldwin, and Didion, and Kesey, and Vonnegut, and Steinem, and Erica Jong and Carl Wittmann The Gay Manifesto and Pynchon. And the events of Allen Kaprow. And Fluxus. And the loves, and the sit-ins, and the deaths, and the rallies, and the speeches, and the demonstrations, and the boycotts, and the walkouts, and the walkouts, and the Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, and Chris Burden shooting and then crucifying himself as a political critic, and Sacheen Littlefeather protesting Oscar’s treatment of the Brando government. the americans.
But now, while the country is overrun by a crazed criminal and his gang of criminals, and incompetent and pathological personalities, while the American president plunders his country in plain sight, while he rounds up and locks up and deports immigrants en masse, while he cares all over the world to make senseless, pointless war, while he destabilizes the nuclear codes in the meeting. in his bruised and paralyzed hand? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a single mass – truly massive – march, rally, protest or demonstration. Not a spirit of organized civil disobedience. Not a play, not a movie, not a novel, not an essay, not a non-fiction book that responds to the zombie Trump administration with originality, vitality, courage. There were pro-Palestinian camps that were sometimes well-intentioned, overly pleasant, and pointless. But beyond the courageous anti-Ice protests in Minneapolis, nothing against Trump. Or to the masters of technology. Or to AI. Nothing on a single college campus screams the war on universities that Trump launched after the camps. Not a single student protesting death chants, from Trump to the regular shrill jeremiads in Wall Street Journal editorial pages, to judge universities by how much money their graduates earn.
Lacking an original theatrical work, you’d think someone would have had the guts to come up with, say, a Leroi Jones production Shower – about race, hate, rage, tenderness, love – in front of every group therapy session at Turning Point USA. Now, after Bari Weiss’s command 60 minuteswhich was once—with notable exceptions—the very emblem of corporate news mediocrity, the legendary news show is remarkably—along with several late-night talk shows—what it signifies an American counterculture. Simply due to being dismantled in part by Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS news, the stable hon. 60 minutes is being heralded as a bastion of subversive vitality. The sad fact is that all the subversive vigor comes from Weiss and her group of reactionaries.
People seem to have abandoned the search for an original creative response to the new American regime. Ironically, the last time there was any American counterculture of consequence was the online forum 4chan in the early 2000s. There the most antisocial, even criminal, sentiments were monetized and politicized in an underground movement. It eventually found its zenith in both the White House and the wider culture, as the profiteering worst drove out the best, all under the guise of patriotism on the one hand and virtue on the other. The only upside to this is that, by taking over American politics, the ball-throwing right, which can only thrive in opposition, has nowhere to go. This is why Trump and Maga are at war with themselves. (This is why Weiss is waging war on her CBS.) That leaves everyone else. And everyone else is paralyzed.
A depressing living example. The counterculture’s ace in the hole, from “free love” in the 1920s, to the orgies of the 1950s (“I want the orgy… of tenderness under the neck” – Allen Ginsberg), to the sexual revolution of the 1960s was always the physical act of love. The genius of the American counterculture’s emphasis on sex has been its political expediency. For the anti-war movement, free love was a transformation of bodies maimed and torn by war into bodies in the service of joy. The F-word was stripped of its murderous undertone. Now that Trump and his cronies use the word routinely, the countercultural energy has been turned on its head. The F word has been reduced to its murderous underworld. “Sit and find out”. You can imagine anti-war protesters shouting some version of what Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, did during the Vietnam War. Now the current defense secretary himself is yelling at the country he is supposed to serve. He has the energy of the other side, which has no energy at all.
The commercial assimilation of once outlawed modernist sentiments is an old story. But politics remained separate from the lower parts of life. This is why scandal was always a reliable political tool. Now the discovery of the hidden drivers of life is no longer a political tool, or a countercultural gesture. For the Maga mentality, the dark depths of life are all there is. Eating, desiring, fighting, fornicating (if they’re lucky), sleeping, dying is, in this purely transactional view of human existence, the reality of life that liberal elites have been trying to cover up with their bigoted gibberish for generations. IS Death in Venice meets Fox and Friends. For Trump and his ilk, the dark side of life is life. Theirs is a barstool nihilism that justifies any belief. They enjoy what the Nazi anti-Semite Celine (Louis-Ferdinand, that is) called the “biological narrative” of the ugly truth of life that a society makes as it slowly disintegrates.
A sign of the times: San Francisco’s subway system – Bart – is about to go bankrupt. The mega-rich tech lords taking over the city all work from home and chauffeur when they need to transport their bodies somewhere. It is symbolic of what the Maga revolution has done. There is no more underground. Everything submerged and hidden that art and intellect brought to light with redemptive harmony and balance is laid bare: dominant, brutal, disharmonized and unbalanced. Existence is strife: here is Trump’s gladiatorial cage. That’s why the right has waged that perpetual war on universities to require taking humanities courses that don’t have the earning power of an MBA. Teaching the humanities is a lesson to look behind the scenes. Seeing behind appearances is with words in Trump’s America. Appearances have dissolved into what once hid behind them. As in business, there is nothing beyond what the eye can measure, what the hand can grasp, what the nose can smell like fear.
Of course, it is not only this normalization of what was once hidden or taboo that has pierced the tension of political, artistic and cultural dissidence. It’s all screens, drugs, and endless knots of distraction; it is all the fragility and fury of feeling trapped by new social and cultural forms that are elusive, inexplicable, implacable, but ultimately irresistible. Trump will rot and disappear. They are actually writing about “Ozymandias” in New York Times editorial page. But for all the factors involved, what is strange, perplexing and even more disturbing than Trump is the disappearance of the vital, creative, courageous opposition to Trump and to the forces and figures he has produced.
(Further reading: Trump is making America’s 250th birthday his own)
