2017 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Weird
Sometimes I wonder what jokes Trevor Noah would tell if a North Korean nuclear missile was dropped on the United States. I say that not to somehow shame Noah for making light of touchy subjects (trust me, I’m not that kind of guy), but because this is something he and the show’s writers may seriously have to consider. The times demand it. In decades past, there were certainly cases where bewildering political circumstances yielded incisive political satire — 1964’s Dr. Strangelove comes to mind. But the legacy of World War II, the bite of Vietnam’s shortcomings, and the weight of the Cold War required that Americans engage in politics with a sobriety and seriousness that removed these issues from other elements of their public lives. Obviously there were activists — first in the civil rights movement, then in the anti-war campaigns — who devoted almost every element of their lives to political action, just like there are today. But being part of these political battles necessarily carried with it a certain gravitas, a certain level of political participation.
Now, anybody can be an “activist.” Make a Facebook post, sign a change.org petition, and you’ve contributed to the cause. Political stances on Trump, the far right, or nuclear holocaust are uttered in the same breath as Netflix recommendations. We’re engaged in politics because we want to care, and we want people to notice that we care. Gone are the days when it seemed like a big deal that someone like Walter Cronkite had made a political statement; today we like all our media to be infused with a healthy dose of socio-political commentary. Indeed our modern media depend on this culture of outrage to function, and the Trump administration’s incompetence, race-baiting, and incredibly abnormal public relations all provide ample fuel for their powerful engines.
Of course, abnormal times require abnormal measures. Yet all of this is a reaction not just to the Trump presidency and the social circumstances that have surrounded it, but also to the very same political detachment that typified previous iterations of the American public landscape. Whereas yesterday reserved pomposity reigned supreme, today raw sincerity is the name of the game — rappers from Lil B to Young Thug to Kanye West wear their hearts on their sleeve to an extreme degree, and “being real” is perhaps the only virtue that matters anymore, even if it means admitting you voted for Donald Trump. We crave meaningful interactions with individuals and despise surface level niceties. In this age of highly abnormal politics and shocking social developments, we demand that our media and our culture be honest with itself and reflect the times we inhabit in a way that is direct and unpretentious.
And yet we crave normalcy. I remember a friend telling me that the day after the 2016 election, he woke up, and walked to class through a college campus that seemed eerily empty and quiet. He mused that he’d gone to sleep after the election results came in and woke up in the wrong dimension. But while the surreal nature of Donald Trump’s victory surely reverberated through the lives of Americans across the political spectrum, within a few short months, things seemed to go back to normal. Sure, every day presented new outrages and new topics for social discourse, but life went on as best it could. Alongside the daily scandals coming out of the White House, we gladly accommodated reality TV-style jabs at Kellyanne Conway’s decorum, Melania Trump’s fashion choices, or the president’s inability to speak in coherent sentences. Much to the chagrin of far-left accelerationists however, the ever-presence of national politics in the national consciousness did not in fact lead to a collective uprising of the American public against the established political order. Instead, our accepted reality of how things should normally be slowly reconciled itself with the world of the impossible, and the exceptional became the banal. How many times have we seen reporters on national television look into the camera and tell us how “unprecedented” the day’s new is? How many New York Times editorials have we seen that proclaim that a given news event definitively proves that Donald Trump is unfit to lead the country?
And then, juxtaposed against this factory of doom and gloom, we have the odd business-as-usual mentality of the late-night talk shows, where the realities of the Trump era have become nonchalantly incorporated into the media cycle. We first got a glimpse of this before the election when Jimmy Fallon infamously rustled candidate Donald Trump’s hair on the Tonight Show, and again when Sean Spicer appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week. Without offering almost any remorse for his confrontational tenure as White House Press Secretary, Spicer received a pat on the back from Kimmel, and went on to appear onstage with Stephen Colbert at the Emmy Awards, receiving rapturous applause from TV’s brightest stars. He’s just like us now, the subtext read — he’s left the administration, and we can laugh and pretend this is all totally normal. It is also totally normal to make fun of the way public figures look and talk just like we’ve done in years past, even though the very rule of law in the United States might be at stake. Trevor Noah demonstrated as much during a segment on the Daily Show about rival Trump lawyers feuding over how much to cooperate, if at all, with the federal Mueller investigation — with the potential for legal obstructionism hanging in the air, Noah chose mainly to focus on the funny shape of lawyer Ty Cobb’s moustache.
Clearly the pundits are not wrong. We do live in extraordinary times. But the public’s reaction to this new way of being has been surreally casual, immersed in a haze of nihilistic memes and catchy Twitter hashtags. We have done everything we can to subsume the bizarre politics of our times into everyday paradigms that we are familiar with, perhaps as a way of coping, and perhaps as a way of avoiding the grim consequences this administration will have on our country’s future. The result however has been an unreality where the weight of what is going on in our world has become strangely lifted off our shoulders.
On September 19th, Donald Trump gave his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York where he focused mostly on berating countries like Iran and Venezuela, but saved his most biting attacks — and also his knowledge of Elton John’s catalogue — for the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un. In speaking about “totally destroying” the country and potentially threatening nuclear war, our president gave Kim the nickname “Rocket Man,” without any hint of irony or self-reflection. I’d say were all the better for it — if or when the nuclear winter finally comes, it will be nice to know that at least our war-mongering leaders did their best to be #relatable.
