NP David Brooks: Trump as Carnival, Trump as Fool

[Allan Balliett]

interesting editorial (better with the accompanying illustration) from
today's NYTimes. Shared in whole for those whose current station in life,
like myself, has put them on the wrong side of the paywall except for 4
stories a month.

-Allan in WV

"This is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write
about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level. I’m
going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or tweets. I
really wish some of my media confreres would do the same"

King David was most compelling when he danced. Overcome by gratitude to
God, he stripped down to his linens and whirled about before the ark of the
covenant — his love and joy spilling beyond the boundaries of normal
decorum.

His wife, Michal, the daughter of King Saul, was repulsed by his behavior,
especially because he was doing it in front of the commoners. She snarked
at him when he got home for exposing himself in front of the servants’
slave girls like some scurrilous fellow.

The early Christians seem to have worshiped the way David did, with
ecstatic dancing, communal joy and what Emile Durkheim called “collective
effervescence.” In her book “Dancing in the Streets,” Barbara Ehrenreich
argues that in the first centuries of Christianity, worship of Jesus
overlapped with worship of Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry. Both Jesus
and Dionysus upended class categories. Both turned water into wine. Second-
and third-century statuettes show Dionysus hanging on a cross.

But when the church became more hierarchical, the Michals took over. Somber
priest-led rituals began to replace direct access to the divine. In the
fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus urged, “Let us sing hymns instead of
striking drums, have psalms instead of frivolous music and song, … modesty
instead of laughter, wise contemplation instead of intoxication,
seriousness instead of delirium.”

When elites try to quash the manners and impulses of the people, those
impulses are bound to spill out in some other way. By the Middle Ages the
cathedrals were strictly hierarchical, so the people created carnivals
where everything was turned on its head. During carnival (Purim is the
Jewish version), men dressed like women, the people could insult the king
and bishops, drunkenness and ribaldry was prized over sober propriety.

As Ehrenreich puts it, “Whatever social category you had been boxed into —
male or female, rich or poor — carnival was a chance to escape from it.”

Sometimes the celebration took on an enthusiasm that is hard for us to
fathom. In 1278, 200 people kept dancing on a bridge in Utrecht until it
collapsed and all were drowned.

The carnivals were partly a way to blow off steam, but in hard times they
served as occasions for genuine populist revolts. In 1511, a carnival in
Udine, Italy, turned into a riot that led to the murder of 50 nobles and
the sacking of more than 20 palaces.

Carnival culture was raw, lascivious and disgraceful, and it elevated a
certain social type, the fool.

There were many different kinds of fools: holy fools, hapless fools,
vicious fools. Fools were rude and frequently unabashed liars. They were
willing to make idiots of themselves. The point of the fool was not to be
admirable in himself, but to be the class clown who had the guts to talk
back to the teacher. People enjoyed carnival culture, the feast of fools,
as a way to take a whack at the status quo.

You can see where I’m going with this. We live at a time of wide social
inequality. The intellectual straitjackets have been getting tighter. The
universities have become modern cathedrals, where social hierarchies are
defined and reinforced.

We’re living with exactly the kinds of injustices that lead to carnival
culture, and we’ve crowned a fool king. Donald Trump exists on two levels:
the presidential level and the fool level. On one level he makes personnel
and other decisions. On the other he tweets. (I honestly don’t know which
level is more important to him.)

His tweets are classic fool behavior. They are raw, ridiculous and
frequently self-destructive. He takes on an icon of the official culture
and he throws mud at it. The point is not the message of the tweet. It’s to
symbolically upend hierarchy, to be oppositional.

The assault on Representative John Lewis was classic. He picked one of the
most officially admired people in the country and he leveled the most
ridiculous possible charge (all talk and no action). It was a tweet
devilishly well crafted to create the maximum official uproar. Anybody who
writes for a living knows how to manipulate an outraged response, and Trump
is a fool puppet master.

The sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are
arguments when in fact they are carnival. With their conniption fits,
Trump’s responders feed into the dynamic he needs. They contribute to
carnival culture.

The first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of
sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not real. It
doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it. It’s just
combative display.

This is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write
about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level. I’m
going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or tweets. I
really wish some of my media confreres would do the same
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