Unreality TV

Unreal city.

Under the brown fog of winter dawn

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

The Waste Land

This post is about an impression I’ve picked up on, one which seems widespread at the moment, both in my experience and that of other people. It is this: There seems to an air of, for lack of a better word, unreality surrounding the still less than 72-hour-old assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

By “unreality” I mean the following: The assassination attempt somehow has the air of a pseudo-event, a false flag, a deep fake, a staged bit of what-if history from a cheesy docudrama. Perhaps the most accurate way of capturing the flavor of the thing is that it seems like a piece of kayfabe, to use the professional wrestling term. (Trump is in many ways a figure that is both analogically and quite literally out of the world of pro wrestling — a genre which blends the real with the fictional in psychologically complicated ways.)

To employ that discourse further, the assassination is a “shoot” that comes off as a “work;” that is, a bit of unscripted historical reality that, aesthetically and psychologically, seems fundamentally scripted and contrived by manipulative authors.

Now I want to be very explicit about my belief that the odds that the assassination attempt was really a scripted “assassination attempt” are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from zero. Why then does the whole thing seem scripted, at least in the sense that, to the extent I can discern this, the vast public seems largely untroubled by and uninterested in this event?

Let me suggest some reasons for this.

(1) Trump’s entire life, and most especially his entire political career, seems like some sort of loosely scripted kayfabe — a reality television show about the potential salvation of America, or its destruction, depending on the audience’s orientation toward the material. The Trump era began in June of 2015 with what everybody assumed was a publicity stunt, and in truth despite everything that has happened since, it’s never stopped having that fundamental flavor. Among other things, the Trump era is for our infotainment media the greatest show on Earth, which is why so much of it clearly wants the series to go on for as long as possible. We are all now, thanks to the evil genius of Mark Burnett, playing the role of the sorcerer’s apprentices, and even something like an attempt to murder Trump that missed by mere inches seems, as Edmund Wilson put it in the middle of the previous century, all part of the act. In other words, everything Trump does and says can and usually should be understood as what can be called “scripted reality.”

(2) A related factor is that the Trump era has featured so many bizarre, unprecedented, surreal, and shocking acts by Trump himself, and those working toward the Donald, that at some point the audience just gets desensitized to it all. If Trump’s head had gotten blown off on live TV, then I suppose this would have been enough to pierce the veil of ennui and indifference that has enveloped so much of the audience, but short of that, it’s just another crazy day in Trumpland, to be succeeded by another crazy thing in another day or three. This is why the assassination attempt seems like it happened weeks ago already.

(3) As readers of Baudrillard will recognize, we live increasingly in a kind of hyper-reality, in which distinctions between the real and the simulated, between the historical and the fictional, between the authentic and the fake, are fundamentally blurred, if not, in Baudrillard’s own radical interpretation, eliminated altogether. Nothing better illustrates the argument of Simulacra and Simulation than Donald Trump, and nothing captures the essence of Trump and Trumpism — to the extent that a total moral and intellectual void can be said to have an essence — than the way in which he became on Saturday almost accidentally like the martyr he is always declaring himself to be.

(4) Underlying all this, I believe, is a sense of profound exhaustion on the part of the public: exhaustion with the Trump show, exhaustion with the attempts to cancel it, exhaustion with a presidential campaign being contested between two candidates who, each for very different reasons, have come to bore so many of them so profoundly, thus committing the only mortal sin still recognized in the infotainment culture that has given birth to monsters, and the sleep of reason. Most of all, they and we suffer from a pervasive sense of unreality that envelopes a politics and culture that are slouching toward a fascism that promises, if nothing else, to entertain them with public life as an unending theater of cruelty and revenge.