John Ganz: What Is Even Happening?

[Nevilledog]

https://johnganz.substack.com/p/what-is-even-happening

Shortly after the election in 2016, a friend remarked to me, “It feels like the whole country has taken LSD.” It’s true. There has been something hallucinatory and psychotic about the past half decade or so: a sense of reality melting and a stomach-churning, vertiginous glimpse into the abyss. It’s not exactly an everyday thing, some periods of time feel normal, but every month or so the psycho-dimension breaks through. People like to talk about the “epistemological crisis” brought about by the Internet, but sometimes it feels more like an ontological crisis, a rend in the very fabric of being itself, as if we are on the verge of entering a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-world where cartoons will walk among us. A game-show host billionaire president beloved by Nazis living in a dark tower with his name stamped on it in Midtown? A Black rapper turned Hitler-lover? An army of electronic trolls” that use frogs and toads as their ensign? It’s all getting so stylized as to approach caricature.

People register this sense of reality-breakdown all the time in different ways: following the news, it’s become cliché to speak of an invisible writers’ room composing a kind of show. While the term “cancellation” suggests a sort of continuity between TV and the world, images and words in culture are felt to have immediate, real-world consequences. Look at how people react to “problematic” content: as if it’s not something that will contaminate and harm. Or the way Balenciaga is being QAnonized: the imagery chosen hinting, for some, to a hidden, dark reality. (QAnon in general is a pretty good emblem for this overall tendency: psychosis as politics, politics as psychosis.) Or Alex Jones and Infowars for that matter. Tucker Carlson’s show, too, has started to tip from the merely repulsive into the utterly bonkers. It’s also been widely remarked how cartoonish and exaggerated antisemite Nick Fuentes appears, that he seems to be an A.I. art simulacrum of a Jew hater. I wrote earlier that antisemitism itself could be understood partially as a “cartoon ideology,” offering a simplified, caricatured explanation of reality. The fixation of incels and groypers on memes and propagandistic comics—Pepes, soyjaks, Chads, Staceys, etc— as true representations of underlying social reality or totems of identity also suggests this process of ideological cartoonification. We should also not forget that one of the first signal moments of this strange era, Gamergate, happened when critics irritated the boundaries of a totally imaginary world.

Kanye West’s appearance on Infowars was yet another moment where the psycho-dimension broke through. I’m not gonna recap the entire interview, but let’s just say the words “I like Hitler” were prominent. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. In a way, by departing from reality, West has put his finger directly on the real. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't,” as Polonius said. While all these far-right goonies play constant games, equivocate, make bad faith disavowals, or employ euphemisms, Kanye doesn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to do all that. He just says the underlying truth of this kind of politics: he likes the Nazis! Yes, he pretty much said this verbatim, “I like the Nazis.” It was too much even for Jones.

But there are darker possibilities that need to be taken seriously. Not that Kanye West will necessarily mainstream Hitlerism; I don’t see things being that cartoonish, but what does it mean when an artist who for so long seemed to be able to channel or embody the zeitgeist takes this turn? Real fascism had Ezra Pound and Céline as its bards, I guess our second-time-as-farce fascism has Kanye West. I used to half-joke that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was real science because you could use it to predict what Kanye West was going to do next. (In a way, Hegel’s book is itself a kind of abstract, cartoon outline of all human history.) Having exhausted the possibilities of his pretensions to Romantic genius and finding his desire for recognition as an utterly free and self-creating individual frustrated, I believed Kanye would necessarily found a kind of insular, hippy cult to satisfy his desire for unconditional self-worship. I didn’t guess until very late he would go Nazi, but maybe I should have: Hitler still represents the fullest possible extent of the morbid distention of the ego that Kanye has been undergoing.

*snip*

[cilla4progress]

1. Bookmarking

Looks like a good read. Thanks.

[fightforfreedom]

2. Fox News and the internet have damaged the brains of many people.

Instant, continuous, propaganda that makes them feel good. They swallow propaganda like pigs at a trough. It's like a drug and it does damage the brain.

[Sky Jewels]

5. And right wing radio.

And Facebook.

I'm hoping that hate radio will begin to drop in influence as younger generations reject it.

[Elessar Zappa]

12. Yep, the primary demographic

for both Fox News and AM radio is 65+. Luckily, younger generations aren’t having any of that bullshit.

[cilla4progress]

3. My belief - and prediction borne out -

is that people are losing it because of the climate collapse.

Our future is clear. Some choose to do what they can - commit with full body and soul - to addressing the problem. Others - the soulless?, the fearful, the blind, are hellbent on taking over society and pre-empting mother nature's hellscape.

In some ways organized religion has set people up for this.

[GenXer47]

6. great point

Even some climate deniers have gone quiet lately. It's not a joke anymore.
Once upon a time, there were no nuclear weapons, resources were "infinite" (of course they weren't) and absent some freak accident, you could pretty much plot your life's course, don't take too many risks, and rest easy that you were gonna be ok.
Kids grow up today wondering what's gonna kill them first - mass shooter in school, a pandemic, nuclear war, or climate change and all the horrors it brings.
It's hard to look young people in the eyes!

[cilla4progress]

11. So true.

This article seems especially on point (no paywall).

Snip:

Drugs killed 8 friends, one by one, in a tragedy seen across the U.S.

GREENVILLE, N.C. — On that terrible day nine years ago, Ellie Laughinghouse Crout was running late. The memorial service for her half sister was starting in an hour and she still hadn’t left home.

The 5-week-old child, Lacy, just seven pounds, had been found facedown in her crib two days earlier, devastating her half siblings, who had been so eager to welcome the baby.

And now Ellie’s phone was ringing. Annoyed, she answered and snapped at her mother, whose tone signaled more calamity. Ellie’s youngest brother, Jackson, distraught over the baby’s death, had gone out with friends the night before. When his mother tried to rouse him from bed that morning, he was gray, with almost no pulse. Tests would show he had four different kinds of anti-anxiety medications in his blood. Five days later, just before his 19th birthday, he was taken off life support.


https://wapo.st/3VvfSLu

[jcgoldie]

4. I think people are giving Kanye too much credit in these analyses

Its a very thoughtful and intelligent piece, but I don't think there's anything to the Kanye West embracing Nazis beyond narcissism and unparalleled ignorance. West has made headlines throughout his career as an iconoclast. He believes that attacking folks most deeply held convictions makes him seem intelligent or independent. He has no idea the meaning of these concepts and it doesn't matter to him. How can you offend everyone's sensibilities at once and make yourself appear the quintessential "free thinker" and rebel? By embracing Hitler he thinks. The one icon that the world reviles universally. The irony is that in expressing his tremendous ignorance to the world, he thinks he appears to be extremely intelligent and unfettered by social norms.

[njhoneybadger]

7. I agree with everything except the Balenciaga thing.

Children posing with that kind of merchandise is fucked up.

[Mad_Machine76]

8. When somebody said something about "living in interesting times"

I doubt that this what they were talking about.

[Johnny2X2X]

9. Late to the party

When Trump came on the scene using slogans that were literally taken from Nazi books. When he started repeating much of the playbook that brought the Nazis to power. When it came out that he had a book of Hitler's speeches he kept next to his bed. When they started making his stage setup for speeches as literal exact copies of stages from Nazi Germany that Hitler gave speeches on. When all of this was happening? Where was everyone?

I mean, my god, we've watched for 7 years now while Trump quoted Nazis endlessly and no one dared call it what it was.

[cilla4progress]

13. I don't agree that no one did.

We here did, as have all my Dem /progressive friends. Also, HRC and other Dem leaders.

Sadly MSM has been MIA, as have everyone on the right!

It's the libertarianism, doncha know!

[Johnny2X2X]

15. I was referring to the media

Yeah, plenty of people here were aware.

I remember many threads here drawing the lines between what the Nazis said and Trump using their same words. And the speech sets were well documented here. They literally took photos of stages at Hitler rallies and designed Trump's stages exactly the same as Hitler's. Like down to the placement of every image, the shape of the stage, the location of flags etc. etc. Perfect recreations save for Swaztikas being replaced with American flags or MAGA/Trump logos. It was insane, I couldn't even believe we were really looking at that, and is was shocking the media largely ignored it.

[cilla4progress]

16. Agreed

When I step back - when I consider the orange vomit was prez! - I am certain the US has gone mad!

I think also it is our karma!

[sarcasmo]

10. The "whole country has taken LSD" theory, would explain the last six years.

[Deep State Witch]

14. We Entered The Upside Down

In 2016. Vecna won.