Society of the Spectacle

His circus, but whose monkeys?

Something that’s even more bizarre than the fact that Trump is holding a UFC cage match on an octagon built on the White House grounds to “celebrate” the 250th anniversary of the United States (and his birthday) is that it’s not being treated as bizarre at all.

Oh, I’m sure it seems bizarre to you. I believe it seems bizarre to most people, and even to a lot of Trump voters, at least those whose brains have not been utterly cooked (such as this instagrammer who thinks it’s hypocritical to criticize this multi-million-dollar martial arts extravaganza because Biden had some drag queens to the White House once). Nobody could think it normal because it is obviously not normal, nor appropriate in any sense.

Yet the media works to normalize it. Some outlets marvel at the size of it — e.g. “Massive Scale of Trump’s White House Construction Revealed — Ballroom and UFC Arena Taking Shape” — as if it were the biggest butter cow at the State Fair. Some tell us Democrats are asking, I shit you not, how will you pay for that. (There’s the other side covered!) Others take the local angle (“Built in South-Central Pennsylvania, ‘The Claw’ arrives at White House ahead of UFC event”). Almost none go with AAAAGGH FOUNDERS SPINNING IN GRAVES as would be fitting

We know why Trump is doing it — or at least I do. Oh, why, yes, I’d be happy to tell you.

I know Tubby is a fan of gladiatorial sports (and that there’s kickbacks in it for him, though that would be true of any other “USA 250” scam), but his taste for those doesn’t explain this decision; I know he’s also a fan of capital punishment, for example, yet he doesn’t hold executions on the White House lawn. So we know he has some limits, and they don’t have anything to do with taste.

The cage match is an offense, but it’s a calculated offense — similar, in a weird way, to the assault he called down on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He did hope to wreck the Electoral Vote count and keep his dream of autogolpe alive that day, for sure. But he chose to do it stupidly and inefficiently with a bunch of rage-addled morons instead of with a team of trained assassins.

That conforms with his apparent feeling about the American establishment. He thinks our rule of laws and norms is too nice, too orderly, and too polite, and should be dirtied and bloodied up by cretins, yobs, and bullies responsive to his bellowed appeals who are his version of the yeoman farmers and artisans that other, fancier people consider the soul of the nation. That’s why he called in the mob instead of the A-Team. (Also maybe the A-Team would want the money up front.)

I think he also believes most Americans feel the same way. But in any case he definitely wants to put his own kind of crude smudge on the big anniversary. However, if his scumbags proposed that he station a masturbating chimp on the dome of the Capitol, or ride into the festivities on a haywagon while fucking a woman dressed as Elly Mae Clampett, he would find it offensive. He does not, in the final analysis, have the Caligulan brio for that. He just wants to show America to be his specific kind of dumb, violent place.

That’s freakish, but the kind of freakish we expect from him. What really gets me is that, apart for the usual liberal agony aunts, the media treats this like something only slightly eccentric, as if he wanted Tuvan throat singers to perform the National Anthem — just a wacky fashion choice like Melania’s Forest of the Damned Christmas decor, rather than an outrage, despite the fact that we can all see that it is.

My own old-fashioned idea of America has me hoping that this activates the silver lining of the Prestige Press having embarrassed itself and lost the trust of the people — that, apart from the total dummies (still as yet not a majority), Americans will understand intrinsically that just because the media plays along doesn’t mean they have to, and that this massacre of good taste will not capture their imagination and have them demanding bloodsport and, who knows, public executions as part of all future patriotic spectacles. I hate to think I’m wrong and that we have indeed become a nation of yeoman mobsters.